Public Works and Utilities Committee Mon, Sep 29, 2025 ยท Public Works and Utilities Committee https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/306 == Executive Summary == The Public Works and Utilities Committee meeting primarily focused on a proposed living wage ordinance amendment. A significant portion of the discussion revolved around whether to postpone the bill to gather more comprehensive survey data, particularly from the business community. Councilors debated the impact of such a postponement on the bill's implementation timeline and the role of various committees in reviewing the legislation. Ultimately, the committee voted to postpone the living wage bill to its next meeting, allowing more time for data collection and review. The committee also received a detailed presentation from the Water Division on its use of interactive dashboards for data-driven decision-making. These dashboards are being utilized to improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, support water conservation efforts, and increase public transparency regarding water and wastewater data. The presentation highlighted examples such as analyzing reservoir inflows, monitoring water usage for irrigation, and providing near real-time E. coli values for wastewater effluent. The meeting concluded prematurely due to a loss of quorum, preventing further discussion on other agenda items. == Key Decisions == - Approved the agenda. - Approved the consent agenda as amended, pulling the living wage bill for separate discussion. - Motion passed to reorder the agenda to hear the living wage bill after public comment but before the scheduled presentation. - Motion to call the question passed (5 Yes, 1 No). - Motion to postpone the minimum wage bill to the next Public Works and Utilities Committee meeting passed (3 Yes, 2 No, 1 Abstain/Absent). == Motions & Votes == - Motion to reorder the agenda to hear the pulled consent item (living wage bill) after public comment but before the scheduled presentation โ€” Passed. - Motion to call the question (on the motion to postpone) โ€” Passed (5 Yes, 1 No). - Motion to postpone the minimum wage bill to the next Public Works and Utilities Committee meeting โ€” Passed (3 Yes, 2 No, 1 Abstain/Absent). == Public Comment == No public comments were made during the meeting. == Topics == - Living Wage Ordinance - Water Data Dashboards - Business Community Input - Survey Methodology - Water Conservation - Interdepartmental Collaboration - Wastewater Data Transparency - Committee Process & Scheduling - Groundwater Monitoring == Full Transcript == Were we able to get Councilor Garcia? We are live. Thank you. I call to order the Public Works and Utilities meeting. It's Monday, September 29th. It is 6:06. We are a little delayed. I apologize for that. Could I get a roll call, please? Yes, ma'am. Chair Amanda Chavez. Here. Commissioner Castro. Present. Councilor Lee Garcia. Here. Councilor Michael Garcia and Councilor Carol Romero. I'm here. Is Councilor Garcia not with us online? Because he did ask for a link. You don't believe he's in the Zoom room, Chair. He's not in the Zoom room. You don't think so? No. Right. Okay. Well, I think we could still move forward. So, Councilor Michael Garcia is planning to join us remotely, but maybe he was unable to after all, so he'll be excused. So next is approval of the agenda. I think there's some proposals around this, but first, staff. Are there changes on the agenda? No changes from staff, Madam Chair. Approve the committee. Madam Chair. Yes. I'd asked to, I had wanted to revisit the item on consent that I had pulled. But in lieu of having Councilor Garcia, he had also mentioned to me that he wanted to ask a couple of questions and he will only be available for a short period of time. So if we go to the presentation first, he won't be able to join on in regards to the living wage item that was pulled by me. I'm not sure though he'll be able to join since he hasn't already, especially since he had 5:30. I don't know if we could just, but we could. I think that's fine. We only have that one item moved. We'll see if he comes after public comment. So you're proposing to arrange the agenda so that we hear items pulled off of consent prior to presentation. Yes, Madam Chair. I think we have to approve the agenda first and then we have to pull the items off of the consent and then we can move them around. But he's talking about the consent as a whole being discussed prior to. Oh, but we could pull them, we can pull them off and then we can move them. All right. So, we have a motion to approve the agenda. Do we have a second? Second. Okay. Could I get a roll call, please? Chair Chavez. Yes. Councilor Castro. Present. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. And Councilor Romero. I'm here. A motion passes. All right. So, next is approval of consent. The only item pulled was item F. Is there any move to approve as amended? I'll second, but I also would like to make a motion to hear that before we hear the presentation. I think first we should approve the consent agenda and then you should make your motion to move it before the presentation. So we have a motion to approve consent as agenda as amended. Do we have a second? I heard a second from Councilor Garcia. Okay. So could I get a roll call vote, please? Chair Chavez. Yes. Councilor Castro. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. Councilor Carol Romero. Yes. Motion passes. Thank you. All right. Thank you for our parliamentarian here. She does. Also, Councilor Michael Garcia is saying that the link is being sent from September 15th meeting, which is expired, some sort. But in regards to that, one of the things that I wanted to bring forward and I know that through discussions, there was a call for a survey on. You think we'll discuss that when? Okay. So I'd like to request that the item pulled from consent be moved before the presentation item that's on our agenda, which would make our consented items before we hear our presentation. Okay. And just to be clear, Councilor, you want it to go after public comment but before presentations. That is correct. Okay. Second. Okay. I have a motion and a second. Can I get a roll call vote, please? Chair Chavez. Yes. Councilor Castro. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. And Councilor Romero. Yes. Right. Motion passes. Next is public comment. Do we have anyone that would like to come up and speak on any items this evening? Nobody today. So, we have no public comment. So, we are going to move to our only item pulled off of consent, which is item F, consideration of Bill number 25, 202521, adoption of Ordinance number 2025 to be determined, brought forward by Mayor Ellen Weber, a bill amending SFCC1987 section 28-1.5 living wage ordinance to increase the city's base minimum wage and update the formula for calculating the minimum wage annually. Rod Gold, senior adviser and public engagement coordinator is here with his team to discuss this with us and I will turn it over to Councilor Lee Garcia who pulled the item. Thank you, Madam Chair. The reason I pulled it and I wanted to bring it forth before this time is to request that the possibility of postponing the item until we get a report, a feasibility study that's being brought forth by the chamber, which reaches out to our small business community. And I think that that information would be very important to hear from our perspective before we start moving through the full committee process. And to see if it would be within the purview of this committee, council, committee, public works to postpone it until we get that information. But Mr. Gold, is that something that is being worked through correctly? My understanding, based on Madam Chair, member Lee Garcia, my understanding from a conversation I've had thirdhand through the mayor and the president of the Chamber of Commerce is that it is running its own survey of its members of their views toward this proposed living wage increase. I don't know exactly when that survey will be complete. And our current survey has now 545 responses and we will keep it open until October 10th, well before the council, the governing body will consider this matter for a final decision. Thank you. And so I guess we don't have any information of specific timeline that the chamber was, is anybody here that can answer to that? Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, to the best of our knowledge, we do not know how long the chamber intended to run their survey. We could look into it. Our, the survey that we are running, we've sent it out to a universe two times of over 10,000 people. I believe the city clerk's office also sent it to their list serve. And then we also have had Food Depot volunteer their services as they hand out boxes to folks. They're also providing information about the survey. So today it's nearly 550 respondents. Okay. And that, that is on target to close on October 10th, you said? Yes. Okay. I again, pushing through the committee process here and getting all information possible. I personally feel it would be wise to listen to what the business community has to say. I know we did hear from somebody that came to speak at public comment last governing body meeting. But I'd like to see what the other members of this committee have as far as input. Secretary Romero. Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't know that we need to hold it here, though. We could move it forward without recommendation. You could vote it up, vote it down, you can abstain if you feel like you can't make a decision without hearing from the business community. It doesn't go for final passage until the end of October, October 29th it looks like for the schedule. So I don't know why we would, you know, delay just moving through the committee process and getting, having the committees have an opportunity to weigh in on it. I know at the last governing body meeting we had the Economic Development Review Committee added to the schedule. I'd also be interested in what they have to do, have to say and if we hold it here, it can't move forward to that committee. So it seems, and that's, I guess actually this week. So if we hold it here tonight and we can only hold it one meeting. I also don't know how what that does to the schedule, but it for sure it means it doesn't go to EDAC tomorrow. So, and I would like to hear what that committee has to say. So I, I think there's some options. You know, you could move it without recommendation. You could abstain for now. You could vote against it for now. Yeah. Until you have more information. I, I think there's some other options besides holding it here is I guess my point. Thank you, Madam Chair. My only concern, oh, sorry. Councilor Michael Garcia. It's not my turn yet. I apologize. Councilor Michael Garcia, I see your hand up. Thank you, Madam Chair. And so quick question, Mr. Gold, did you say that the survey that the city is conducting will be ready by October 10th? Yes, Council Member Garcia, it will be held open until October 10th. Currently, there are 545 responses to it. Okay. And so my concern with that is that that will, that information will be provided after it's already gone through a proposed committee review process. I must remind folks, there's always, you know, the saying of the work is done at the committee and I want to follow that, that, that process. And so, whether it's the city-led survey or the survey that the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce is putting together themselves, I'm, I'm deeply interested in that because I, I want to ensure that we are fully representing our community business interests. This, we, we've got to remember this is a proposal that will have an impact on business. I, I, I on the onset, I am in support of such a proposal that's before us. But with that being said, I need to hear from the community and from business interest to ensure that we're moving forward with the appropriate process and these committee review processes is the place to do it. Is there a reason, Mr. Gold, why this survey was not conducted in enough time to have the results through the committee review process? Madam Chair. Yes. Councilor Michael Garcia, first of all, we had to introduce this legislation to determine whether or not there was sufficient interest on the part of the governing body to proceed. After you gave us that permission, we held a community meeting at the Southside Library involving over 50 people. We then held a remote meeting the next night involving another dozen. You had a public hearing last Wednesday that I think involved 20 speakers and we released the survey two weeks ago and already have 545 responses. We can tell you the results of those 545 responses. We can summarize that for the committee tonight if that's of interest to you. We just thought we'd leave it open as long as possible. Given that the council, the governing body won't take final action until the end of October. We, we could curtail the city survey at any time. And we, we've got a pretty good sense of where it's going now based on the heavy response that we've received to date. Right. But and but my concern with this city-led survey is it's not really reaching out to business. It's reaching out to constituents, not business, from from hearings that the list serves that it went to, whether it was through the city clerk's office or through folks that were receiving services at Food Depot. Those are the individual residential responses. Again, because this is a proposal that will have an impact on business, I, I strongly feel that we need to ensure that we're taking into consideration all perspectives. Again, I'm, I'm in support of this on the onset. I do have some, some questions, but I first want to have a holistic perspective of information being presented and provided and, and I don't feel we're having that right now, especially given that when, when we had our study session nearly a month ago, I raised concerns that the, the businesses that were cited in the survey weren't necessarily sufficient. we needed to have a better representation of the business community. So with that, I would be in favor of holding this back just because we need to ensure that this work is done at the committee level. Once it passes committees, then it goes to the governing body, and I don't want to run into the challenge that we even saw last week when I was trying to create an amendment, when there were arguments being made that the amendment should have been made at the committee level. So we can't have it both ways. This is the time and place to get this done. I want to get this implemented as quickly as possible. We've got to remember that even if this were to be adopted tomorrow, it's not going to take effect until January 1st, 2027. So by postponing it at a meeting, it's not going to delay the implementation of the process. I want to make that loud and clear. If this gets postponed tonight, it does not delay the implementation of raising a minimum wage to $17.50. All it does is allow for us to gather more critical information to ensure that we're passing the most precise and best policy that we can. That's what our job is. So thank you, Mr. Gouls, for the information. Thank you, Madam Chair. No other questions. Mayor: Thank you, Councilor Garcia. Councilor Castro. Councilor Castro: Yes. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to see if you'd be open to possibly, after you speak, entertaining a motion to approve, and then we could continue the discussion. Mayor: Yeah. So my suggestion is, I think it would be wise to be giving us updates on this survey data this whole time. I would, and I know that Councilor Romero works here, so she'll correct me if I'm wrong. I would like to move forward without recommendation, but seeing it again on our agenda on Monday, October 13th. And we received the same presentation that I hope will be present at Quality of Life when this item is pulled. But the survey data is irrelevant if we don't have access to it during committee where the work is supposed to be done. Why I would want it to come back to Public Works is because not all of us, so Public Works, not all of us are on all the committees. All right. So I think that Quality of Life will have a portion of the data, but we have individuals that aren't on Quality of Life. It will go to Finance. I'm not on Finance. Other councilors aren't on Finance. I would like to be able to be aware of this data with the individuals I work with and committee for that discussion. So that is what I would suggest we do so that we could visit it again. We're not altering the schedule because there is data available to us. That's, you know, it's there, but it's, we would like that to be present at Quality of Life and then revisited, come Public Works on October 13th, is what I would recommend. Madam Chair, I think we can, the other thing, understanding, so if the presentations, for instance, about the survey results that you have currently, can be made to the Quality of Life Committee tomorrow, wait, no, today's Monday, Wednesday, sorry, and then to Finance on the 6th, those two committees make up all of us. So it doesn't necessarily, we don't necessarily have to come back to Public Works to hit all of the councilors. If you hit Quality of Life and Finance, you hit everybody, including Councilor Lindell, because that's the only committee that she sits on. And I guess if something comes up in the course of, you know, as we're talking about it at the committee level, we can always refer it back to a committee. If, for instance, something comes up and we want to have amendments, I feel like it's a little early to be holding it now when we have this whole agenda, including EDAC on Wednesday night, which I actually would like to have EDAC weigh in. So I'm not sure I'd like to hold it here. I think you can get to all the committees. We can get all the processes. We can always refer it back if there are amendments that we feel like need, if the bill needs work, we can hold it at another committee or we can refer it back to a committee before it goes to the governing body on the 29th. So I just think this is a little early to be holding it here. Councilor: And I see what you're saying. I will say, and I want to caution us, when we collect survey data from our community and don't use it during our process, it looks like we're doing it just to check a box, in the fact that it's not meaningful, and I know that it is, but it would be nice if there was an initiative that, like, we were getting email updates if this information was readily available to us. Madam Chair, yes. Mayor: Or to interrupt, but we are happy to summarize the data that we've got right now if that will please the committee. Councilor Garcia. Councilor Garcia: Madam Chair, I, I think in lieu of also having an opportunity to propose amendments, obviously, because if we were to move forward without a recommendation, with a request that it comes back to a committee, to our committee, whether it be Public Works and Utilities, because does that give us the opportunity to talk about the amendment and again, saying doing the work, because I believe that there should be some amendments to this. It's just from my perspective. Mayor: I don't think we can do that procedurally, is the problem. Councilor: Do we refer? I don't think we can refer, we can't make referrals just as a committee. I don't think we have to take that up to the governing body. Like, I think maybe we could take it next week to the governing body and say we want it to come back to Public Works. But just like Councilor Casset did with the Economic Development Review Committee, she couldn't just on her own refer it or as a chair refer it once it got to her. She had to have the whole body refer it. So I don't think, I don't think we can add it. Councilor: I understand that. Yeah. So I guess with that, I'd like to make a motion to postpone to the next Public Works and Utilities meeting if somebody else would second. Councilor: Second. Mayor: You have a motion. We have a second. Can we get a roll call vote, please? Councilor: Madam Chair, yes. Mayor: Discussion. Councilor: May I ask the sponsor? May I ask Mayor Weber, what's the rush if there's not a significant deadline that needs to be met within the next two weeks? What detriment would it be if we were to hold this up, ultimately still approve this, and it still had the same timeline of a January 1st, 2027 effective date? Mayor Bubber, go ahead. Mayor: I don't think it would have the same timeline of getting through our governing body process. Councilor: I'm talking about implementation, Mr. Mayor. Mayor: I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about implementation. I'm talking about the process that we voted on in terms of the committee process that would bring it back to the governing body. It's been laid out now since the bill was introduced, and we're trying to adhere to that so that there's some sense of certainty, not only for the members of the governing body, but for the public as they plan their attendance at these various events. They need to know whether the dates are going to hold fast or not. And we've had this out there now for, as Mr. Gould mentioned, since the bill was introduced. We did add EDAC because Councilor Casset quite legitimately identified that as a step that really does relate to the constituencies of direct interest. And if you're interested in the survey data, we have it right here. If you'd like that presentation, we sort of jumped the gun from having a presentation on the work that's been done to date to simply considering a process discussion as opposed to something based on substance, which is the work to date that has been done, which Mr. Gould has been participating in the meetings we've had in my office with Bridget Dixon and the head of her, of the Chamber Committee, representatives of the business community who heard from the head of Tomitas that he's been intimately and integrally involved. He frankly said it's the first time anybody has asked him for his opinion about city policy. We've had meetings with multiple people from the hotel and hospitality industry, and their input was carefully weighed in the generation of the bill. I agree with you that the Chamber's data will be useful, but we do have broad-based data already that Director Nelson is here quite prepared to share with you if you'd like to hear it. Yeah, I think we could hear from Director. Councilor: Well, well, Madam Chair, I think the question was, would delaying this ultimately affect the implementation date of January 1st, 2027? And since the mayor didn't want to say no, I'll say no. It doesn't. It doesn't. Mayor: Let me check. No, Councilor, that wasn't the question. You. Councilor: It was the question, Mr. No, it was his question. He asked if it would be a delay. Mayor: The question was, what's the rush? And I take exception to that characterization. And there is no rush. We're simply trying to follow the process that we voted on as a governing body that laid out the dates that we were originally going to adhere to. Councilor: But it's right, Mr. Mayor, to postpone and really vet a proper process such as this. As Councilor Romero Worth always says, the work should be done in the committee. And that's what we're trying to do here. And so I'm just wanting to reconfirm that if we were to postpone this, that it's not going to have a detrimental effect to an implementation date, because as I've mentioned on the onset, I am in support of raising our living wage. What I want to ensure is that we're doing it in a manner that does as minimal negative impact in our community as possible. So thank you, Madam Chair. That's all I've got. Mayor: And Councilor Castro. Councilor Castro: Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that I did want to make a motion earlier. And I'll wait till after we take a vote. But my comments were that the business community has been disproportionately a part of this conversation, actually, as we heard the Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce asked that we support it as is. And I've actually been surveying a lot of folks in the community, and just anecdotally, they've been saying that they're paying a lot higher than what even we're proposing. So after we take the vote, I would like the opportunity to make a motion. Thank you. Madam Chair. Councilor Marworth: The again, the only thing, I understand the point about doing work at committee. There's plenty of committees still to be had, and all the governing body members could have an opportunity to amend a bill either at Quality of Life or Finance, or we can refer it back if we need to. I guess the thing is, is that Economic Development Review Committee, I think if we hold it here tonight, they can't have it on their agenda on Wednesday. Their next meeting then isn't until November. And so I just feel like we, you know, I mean, if the, if the objective is to just run out the clock on this governing body, then this is a perfect way to do it. But I, I think if we're trying to adhere to the schedule that's been laid out, honor all the things, give, you know, let's bring, I want that information, too. There's plenty of time for that. There are other procedural motions that can be made with this if people don't want to vote on it right yet. And I think we, we can, you know, keep it, keep it moving, keep it, keep getting the information and keep hearing from the relevant constituencies that all these committees represent. So I, I, I, I'm just not sure that holding it here again tonight is the best option. That's all I have. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mayor: Thank you. I will say, yeah, EDAC will meet again November 5th. But I do, I'll go back. I have a huge issue with us saying that we're collecting data and trying to get it through this process prior to that data. And I know you keep saying we have some data. We also just had the staff state to us that they have no idea when the business data would be available. So that's missing part of it, right? Because we said we did not know when the Chamber of Commerce's results would be available. That's what was said. Madam Chair: That was what was said. You are accurate. That is what I said. But it would be remiss of me not to also elaborate upon that the 10,000 people who we sent the survey to is from the list serve in the Office of Economic Development. So those entities, those businesses, many businesses, we sent the list out. So it's a wide range of folks who have received it. And often when we, thank you very much, often when we have a data set or when we've collected data, it comes when we start the process. So that's confusing to me that there is this pending, like the survey is closed. We have a data analysis of that complete data set, and that's when information is presented at committee. So every committee is receiving the opportunity to review a data set that's trying to dictate to us a direction to take. This is different. I'm just calling it out. It's different than what we've done before with a lot of things that involve a data set. Madam Chair: I understand what you're saying. I hear you. So, we also asked the Chamber to distribute the survey, but we don't know, we don't know. No, absolutely. And I see that's out of your hands, but I'm saying I think that's where my hesitation comes from, is just that point. I think that collection of the data needs to be a complete process before it goes through our process so that we all have the same information and we're all well-informed the same way, because that's often how everything else works when we have a data set. So that's all I'm saying with... Madam Chair: We had intended to close the survey earlier, and frankly, this is my fault. I got excited about reaching more people. And in my mind, I was thinking, well, October 29th is when we're going to be before everyone, and October 10th will, I set that date, and we can change that date and close this survey earlier. We've had really robust response, and I know Johanna has some really informative feedback from that survey to share with you all now. So, I just wanted to put that on the table as well. And I will leave it up to the committee if they'd like to see that presentation. I myself, I think all information is good. I do still kind of stand by, I would love a complete analysis of the data we receive. Everyone's given the opportunity to fill out the survey, everyone's voice. It's, we're creating an opportunity for every voice to be heard, and we're receiving that information as decision-makers the same way is what I'm comfortable with, but I will, I don't know if there's any other feedback. Councilor Garcia. Madam Chair: I don't have anything else. I just, I do feel that in order for us to propose any kind of amendments, the data won't be here before the opportunity to propose any kind of amendments would be at the committee level at Finance, and not everybody sits on Finance. And so, with that, I believe that this would be the only way to do more work at the committee level in the case that any one of us would like to propose any kind of amendments. So with that, I'll call the question, Madam Chair. All right. So, can we get a roll call vote, please? Again, we have a motion to postpone this. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. He called the question. He needs a second. I believe I have a motion and a second to postpone. Is that different? Yeah, but he's calling the question, so he needs a second in order to call the question. Second. All right. Now, we have to vote on that motion. And to be clear, motion to postpone this. No. No. Okay. Sorry. So to call the question means we're... We're ready to vote. We're ready to vote. So now you have to call, now you have to take the roll on that motion about whether the committee is as a group ready to vote, and that motion has to pass first, and then you go back to the substantive motion on postponing. Actually, it's not that substantive, the other procedural motion. Understood. Thank you. On the call to question, Councilor Romero Worth. No. Councilor Michael Garcia. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. Councilor Amanda Chavez. Yes. Councilor Aliccastro. Yes. Okay, motion passes. So now we... Now you go directly to roll call on the motion to postpone or, yeah. Okay. On the motion to postpone. Councilor Romero Worth. No. Councilor Michael Garcia. Yes. Councilor Lee Garcia. Yes. Councilor Aliccastro. No. And Councilor Amanda Chavez, Chair Amanda Chavez. Yes. Motion passes. Thank you so much for being here. All right, now we are done with consent. We're going to move back to presentation. So we now welcome our presentation. Thank you so much for being patient with us as we went through that process. We have Water Division using dashboards to work smarter. Steve Schultz, Water Resource Coordinator, here with us. Welcome, Chair, members of the committee. Appreciate the opportunity to speak to you tonight about our water dashboards. So I'll start by just explaining what a dashboard is. Then I'm going to go through some examples of the benefits they've provided us. They're listed here. I'm going to go in more detail in the first couple of slides. All right. How's that? Is that working better? Okay. Before I get started, I just want to thank, I'm the one speaking about these things, but I'm not the only one involved. This took a whole team. It starts with the leadership from the top down from Dr. Roach as the Utilities Director, Jonathan as the Water Division Director, Bill as the Water Resources Conservation Manager. All of these folks really supported this initiative. And then to get it done, it took a whole team. So, I wanted to thank Chris Hely at Canyon Road, Eric Armstrong at BDD, there are SCADA managers, the wastewater team, the IT team, and then I wanted to introduce the rest of the Water Resources team. Walker Williamson has been integral in setting this up, and we have Levi Newell, a new hire, who will become integral in using the dashboards. So, thank you to everyone involved. So, let's start by what is a dashboard? A dashboard is an interactive display page that rolls up large data sets into simple interactive visualizations. Really, it just allows easy access to the data for us to support our decision-making. These things are accessible via web browser, and they're always up to date. That's the really great thing about these. So, how does that work? This is a diagram here that kind of shows all the different types of data we use in water resources. We use data from Bureau of Reclamation, from the State Engineer, USGS, goes down the line. We also use our own data that we collect through the SCADA systems. Every night in the middle of the night, there's some scripts that run, shoot these data out to a cloud database, and then this software program called Power BI brings it back onto a web page for us to view. So I mentioned a lot of benefits. So the following slides, each one will show one specific example of a benefit that these have provided. But in summary, you'll see these are really big benefits. It increases our efficiency, reduces our staff time. It improves data-driven decision-making both in the near-term and long-term planning. We've improved interdepartmental collaboration using the dashboards. There have been supporting water conservation, permit compliance and reporting, regional collaboration, and public transparency. So the old way, if we want to look at a plot like this, and I'm not going to go into the details of these figures that I'm going to show here, but if we wanted to look at, this one is inflow to McClure Reservoir. So, in the past, if we wanted to look at something like this, we needed to spend an hour or two hours going out, pulling the data, putting it in a spreadsheet, copying formulas, all this stuff. And then immediately it's stale. We want to do it again next month. Got to repeat that whole process. And this goes down the board for us. An hour, two, not a big deal here or there, but it all adds up. So, the new way is we're not spending time doing that anymore at all. We're spending time understanding the data, what it means, and supporting our decisions. A key place this has shown up, we have weekly meetings on Tuesday mornings across the Water Division to plan our operations for the week as well as touch on any other recent topics. And I know that Jesse has mentioned this in past meetings. In those meetings, these operations meetings, there's some experts that have sort of a feel for things, but may not know the exact data. So, we're sort of going on feel a lot now in these meetings. Two, three times per meeting, we end up pulling up the dashboard to answer a question that comes up. This particular example shows a question that came up a couple weeks ago of, well, we have high water demand now. When's it going to drop off? So, we can just quickly plot up the past few years and see that demand drops off pretty soon, but it kind of depends on the weather. Maybe a few weeks, maybe late October. The other next benefit I'm going to talk about is interdepartmental collaboration. So this is a page that we're collaborating with Parks on. So, we have the data from all of our water meters go to the app Ion Water that I'm sure you've heard about. It also comes to us, and we can connect that to the parks, and we can get this visual page of showing how much water the parks are using. I also mentioned, so needless to say, our biggest parks, Franklin Miles and Rego Park, are the ones that use the most water, but they're the biggest. So, I mentioned that these things are interactive. You can see these dropdown menus up at the top. You can really interact with these pages, and you can go in there and say, "Well, wait, let's not look at total water. Let's look at water per area of irrigation." And then the results look very different. So you can then see where we have less efficient parks with a higher water use per irrigated area and the more efficient parks. So it turns out that Franklin Miles and Rego Park are actually quite efficient despite being large parks using more. For water conservation, we've used this dashboard again with the interactive feature. We connect those meters to the parcels that they serve. And so that allows us to interact with the data. Again, we can use this filter up here, look only at apartment buildings. We can select our date range that we want to look at. And then we can sort, and we can get this little diagram over here that we can just pick on, find the highest per unit usage apartment complex. So that's being used for conservation to help evaluate where to do some retrofit programs potentially. This one's not the prettiest slide, but it's maybe the one that has provided the most benefit to date. For BDD reporting, BDD reporting in the past has used a very complex spreadsheet that not a whole lot of people understood. It was very time-consuming. It was error-prone. Now, it's all automated. These are the reports that go to the state engineer each month, and we spend our time reviewing them, what they mean, not time developing them and bringing data in from different sources. So, that's been a real, a lot of these are multi-benefit, right? This is really an efficiency and accuracy benefit as well. I'm going to skip over, in the interest of time, these groundwater ones. I'll just say in summary, I'm a groundwater person, so I was kind of jazzed up on getting these in here. We're getting a lot smarter on the aquifer and how, which is basically supporting our understanding of long-term sustainability. In the process, we're also collaborating regionally with this setup. Now, we're going to be, not quite yet, but in the next few weeks, we're going to be pushing our monitoring data, our groundwater monitoring data, out to the state's New Mexico Water Data Initiative website. And so that's what the state has stood up for transparency, ease of access, a one-stop shop for going to get data on groundwater. And the last benefit I wanted to highlight was public transparency. Now, this one is for wastewater, but it's leveraging the dashboards that we developed in water because we use the wastewater data as well. This is available on our website right now, on the wastewater website. There's a link to waste to reclaimed water data, and it's showing near real-time, as soon as the data come in, what the E. coli values are of the effluent going to the lower Santa Fe River. So, just in recap, we're working smarter and we're working more efficiently because of this. We're really using this for data-driven decision-making, interdepartmental collaboration, water conservation. I mean, these are all big things, right? Permit compliance and reporting, regional collaboration, and public transparency. So, we're continuing our QA/QC, quality assurance, quality control, on the dashboards. We're also using the same software for our long-range planning. We did a presentation about it last November. It's a really powerful tool and how this Power BI tool can aggregate data, and what it's going to do is going to make, really, kind of leveling up our water planning. We're able to look at tens of thousands of future scenarios and digest what it means rather than spend a bunch of time processing the data. So, our next steps on it are to kind of roll it up. We're using it more on a detailed technical basis. Now, what we want to do is roll it up for high-level summaries of system status. Find things that are, that are, you know, maybe red flags if there's something in the system we should be aware of, etc. Then, provide public access to some of those key summaries on our website. We want to keep increasing this interdepartmental collaboration and as well as use it to support data-driven water conservation targets. So, with that, kind of lost a few of the committee members, but I'm happy to take questions, and if you're interested, we could do a live demo as well, but that's at the will of the committee. Thank you. And I think we lost Councilor Garcia, but I believe we still have Councilor Castro. We better, or else we're going to have to adjourn because we need three in order to continue. Councilor Castro, are you still there? Okay. I don't have any questions. Do you have any questions, Councilor? No. And I thank you for, I just want to make a comment. Thank you for the data. This is very intricate. I think it's really important that we are all in tune with this because it's such an important deal for our city, I mean, for our future. And so, thank you guys for the work that you do in regards to providing true data that we can follow. And I think the more we continue to do this, because the question that everybody has is, where does the water come from? Well, you can tell them with this type of information. It's coming from here, it's coming from there, it's coming from different places. And we're able to sustain this by tracking it. It's not just one, we're just not digging a hole and pulling water out of the ground. It's, it's, it's pretty intricate, and so there's a lot to it. I just want to say thank you for this actual information. Yeah, and I'll just echo that. I've heard these presentations, both your pieces of this that you've done to the community and the Water Conservation Committee. And I think it's also going to be really important for making policy choices, as you sort of alluded to, especially with the conservation work and with all the planning that we have going at different levels and in different aspects. So, this is very exciting. I also just want to say that the wastewater data is really important. We didn't have that, and I believe we were manually emailing it to a nonprofit that was putting it on their website. So, I'm glad to see the city stepping up and putting that information directly on our own websites. That's absolutely what we should be doing. And so, really glad to see all this work coming together into one place. Unfortunately, I think we're going to have to leave it there because we have lost a quorum, and so I don't even think, I mean, we didn't have anything else. I'm just going back to our agenda. Yes, Councilor. Thank you. Does that, I mean, even though we don't have a quorum, we still hear a presentation if there are members of the public watching on Zoom? Well, we don't have anything else. So, I think we just need to end this here. So, we're not going to go through the rest. We, we still had matters from staff, matters from the committee, matters from the chair. And we are, but this was the last substantive thing we had. So, we are adjourned. Thank you, everybody.