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1993-03-06 SPECIAL TOWN BOARD MEETING MARCH 6, 1993 9:05 p.m. MTG.#19 TOWN BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT Supervisor Michel Brandt Councilman Betty Monahan Councilman Susan Goetz Councilman Nick Caimano Councilman Pliney Tucker Guests- Representatives of O'Brien and Gere and Kestner Engineers Supervisor Brandt-Opened the Meeting. The Town Board has been asked from the day we came on board in January last year to consider an expansion of the Water Treatment Plant and we have been while that has been in our minds somewhat we have not addressed it totally and this year we have decided to address it and try and make some decisions. At least for myself I felt we did not have enough information and as it tumed out there was a whole study here that because we are a new board did not have access to that study we did not see it. We since have gotten it very recently and had a chance to look at it and do some investigation of our own and look into what could be here and at least ask to look for the right questions to ask. I asked for Kestner people to make a quick overview and review work that they had done in the '80's the late 80's to see if there were other alternatives to what was being proposed and we now have everybody together and I would like to really just open the floor to a general discussion. I think there are several things we need to establish and one how much water do we use today how much water do we need? What is the basis of our projection of what are needs are? Then if we know how much we need then how do we best expand to get to full fill those needs. With that I am going to open it up and start. I have questions of my own, one is in looking at the original report Councilman Caimano-Which one? Supervisor Brandt -O'Brien and Gere on the, there are some things that when you were looking at the growth in Queensbury Councilman Goetz-What page are you on? Supervisor Brandt-Page seven in particular. I look at it this way, I guess I should start out, the Town Board has got to make the basic decisions of where the Town is going and that is town wide whether it is the Water Dept. or all other Depts. and come to policies of what it is attempting to do with the community. One of the things that I see on page seven is a proposed Glen Lake Water Dist. and I do not know of a proposed Glen Lake Water Dist. I am not aware of one, and who is proposing it and what is the purpose of it and how much water is it going to consume I guess that is one of the things that is a question. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Dept. Water Supt.-Several years ago the Town Board was interest in the concept of providing water to people in the vicinity of Glen Lake and at the same time provide a secondary transmission line that would get water from the east side to the west side. They hired Kestner Engineers to do a map, plan and report and correct me if I am wrong guys, to do a map, plan and report cost evaluation of that. Kestner did that, they anticipated dollars for construction costs, they projected gallons that might be involved.. . and at that time the Board decided that it was not cost effective to do that and let the project drop. Councilman Goetz-When was that report done? Mr. Quentin Kestner-About 1988, 1989 Councilman Goetz-I wonder why it would be in a 1991 report, of O'Brien and Gere? Mr. Quentin Kestner-I did not bring that with me but they did, there was quite a bit of interest on the part of people in the vicinity of Glen Lake and so we did do that report. One thing that was going on at that time at the same time we were doing that report was a major planned unit development Hiland Park. We saw some advantage in upgrading the general system in this area because it was going to be a major water user over in this vicinity. But, that as it tums out has not happened, but that was a big plan back then and so that was part of it. There are some people in that are that were very serious, very interested in water, we did do some costs and I do not have the report right in front of me but it was not inexpensive we had taken some of the costs and put them across the general district because they would increase the overall reliability of the transmission line. I think there was a tank proposed, Gary Bowen was talking, we were discussing Gary Bowen a tank in the vicinity, in generally in this vicinity of course that did not happen so, and the cost was not small and it didn't move forward. Councilman Caimano-Let me ask a question Mike, rather than get into specifics why don't we do this why don't we ask each of Kestner and O'Brien and Gere take about ten to fifteen minutes each for an overview of how they see things today visa vie their report and I got a nickel out here I am willing to flip a coin to see who goes first, as fair as possible and then the individual questions will come as a result of their general presentation. I think that would be the easiest thing to do. What do you think? Supervisor Brandt-I have no problem, would that make sense to you people? Mr. Kestner-That is fine with me, I will go first or second I do not care. Councilman Caimano- Y ou guys, well here we go, I will put heads is O'Brien and Gere and tails is Kestner. It's is tails. Mr. Quentin Kestner-I am on. I would like to start this discussion offby wanting to know what the general situation was today and we focused on that. As a background he is correct we did study this before on ... we did study plant expansion before and let me bring you back to the mid 80's in the Town of Queensbury because we were very active in it. We were in the process of installing the sewer system about seventeen miles of sanitary sewer and I was also the engineer for the Planning Board and I used to attend three or four Planning Board workshops a month and take back with me big manilla box full of plans and we used to meet until 1 :30-2:00 o'clock in the morning two or three times a month and there was quite a bit going on. We had Hiland Park we had Earltown which was going to happen, we had a lot of larger developments and to make a long story short the Board asked us in '87 to take a look at the existing facilities and determine what it would cost to add an additional 5 mgd. When we did the plant back in the early '70's that was the concept. We built five then build another five and then build another five, so the plant was designed to be expanded five mgd increments. At that time we recommended a five mgd addition. That was founded on a couple of situations, one, the Town was expanding very rapidly, two at that time the State was discussing a revision of the turbidity limits and turbidity is really the main criteria that they seem to use in evaluating the acceptability of drinking water. At the time the standard was one they were discussing, EP A was, it seemed, serious about discussing a standard of point one a substantial increase in turbidity. So, we looked at a plant that we felt would probably meet a point one although we knew at the time that maybe that was going to happen maybe it wasn't. So, we came up with a cost and about five to five and a half million dollars for those facilities. A little bit more than a dollar a gallon. We then did a update of that report about two years later and costs were increasing at the rate of about I think about eight to ten percent over the two years that we went from the Spring of '87 to about mid '89 and we raised the cost up to about five point eight million dollars for the same five million gallon expansion. At that point there started to being, quite a bit of discussion about regionalism and a water authority and I was asked to take a look at a full zoning build out, water sales to a number of communities all the planned unit developments that were planed at that time full build out of Hiland, full build out of Earltown, West Mt. had a large plant planned there were a number of other smaller plants and I was generating numbers up into the twenty, twenty five mgd range if everything that everybody said that they were going to do was going to happen. At that point things just kind of went into limbo at least as far as we were concerned, that board was focusing on a much larger facility. We mentioned a few things that the time, one of them was if, and if you look at our earlier reports we indicated that although the average flows were in the two point seven what happened in the Town of Queensbury was come summer with unlimited lawn sprinkling you get very high water use two three days spikes if you will, goes up to seven, seven and a half mgd and it drops back down. With that background, let me show you what happened in 1992. (Used Charts) What I did here was took information that Ralph generated for me and a put it in a little computer program and it came out with a montWy plot of three parameters, the first parameter is production, ok that is the yellow bars here there is one for every day of the month, twelve sheets and to put it into perspective here is five million gallons per day. Ok, January, February you can see somewhat consistent March, April look what happens in June starts to raise you get into July, August, September, October, November, December. Now the average here if you took all these production numbers and added them up and divided by three hundred and sixty five days you would get about two point seven million gallons. You had a peak of I think around six, here is six so you had a couple of days when the flow was up to six. Now the year before that they had a couple of days when the flow was up to seven point four. But in 1989 which was a relatively wet summer the highest flow recorded was I believe was about four point eight. So, you can see that the high flows are really a result it is a seasonal situation. It is primarily what I call non essential water use, lawn sprinkling things of that nature and it puts a high demand on the system for a limited period of time then it drops back down. Obviously the montWy average creeps up for June, July and August. Councilman Caimano-How many days were over three point seven five? Mr. Kestner-We were over there forty two days, ok. Let me show you that, I am glad you asked that question because I noticed that was in your annual report. Forty two days over the three point seven five. However, I guess my response to that is how significant is that? Let me back up just a little bit before I get over to the forty two days and let me show you the two other things I plotted. I plotted flow, I also plotted raw water turbidity, ok that is the quality of the water coming into the filtration plant, that is the red, this is five NTD's ok, five NTD's is up here so you can see what happens in the spring time they get, they get a spike up to five but in general it is below that. You get down in here and it starts to drop and in the summer when you have your high demands the turbidity drops a little bit you get an occasional spike but you can see for yourself what that interconnected red dots are doing. Now, the third parameter I plotted was finished water turbidity. Now, let me clear up in case there is a mis-conception the standard right now is one, ok, the standard is right here but it is going to change the end of June this year and it is going to be point five. So, I plotted point five here this blue line is point five, finished water turbidity. That is what the Health Department looks at. What they are going to do is they are going to and I think Ralph is already doing this, you take six samples a day you record it continuously and pick six points and over a thirty day period you have one hundred and eighty samples, ninety five percent of those samples have to be below point five. Do you agree with that? Mr. VanDusen-Currently, we are monitoring on a continuous basis and we pick points off the graph and... Mr. Kestner-So what the Health Dept. is going to do is make you pick the same time of the day I believe they are talking about that right now and you are going to have to be ninety five percent of your samples have to be below point five, so how are we doing right now? Well in 1992 here is point five this is this line and this blue dot interconnected blue dots this is our finished water turbidity. We are doing pretty good. We in 1992 we did not go above point five. So, in spite of the high flows and one thing I point out here you will see that high flows do not mean bad water quality as a matter of fact the quality concern is more of a spring time phenomena ok. If you look at that bottom blue line especially for months of July, August you can see they run a very, it is a very consistent treatment process and these results have, are much better in '92 than they were in the three or four previous years and I can let Ralph explain what he did but they started to use Soda Ash and they have had a nice more consistent finish water since they started to do that. So, the situation is here is our production rates in '92 here is the raw water here is the finished water. Now here is five mgd lets talk about three point seven five where does that come from? Because I was involved in the construction of the plant and the design of the plant back in '74 we put in two traveling bridge filters shallow filters sixteen inch beds and the guy by the name of Gil Faustel was head of the design section in the Health Dept. at that time and he was not fully sold on the concept of a sixteen inch filter bed. He was a little bit concerned about it. Also what we did was put an activated carbon media in one of the beds and he definitely was not convinced that activated carbon was going to filter like sand anthracite would. So, the initial permit said you are limited to three point two five million gallons per day running in series until you can prove the filterability of the activated carbon. When we got back into the plant design back in '87 nobody had really spent any time to do a filterability test so we were still at three point two five. Ralph performed an in house high rate filter study primarily focusing on turbidity but other factors in what, in a chart A that the Health Dept. uses and the Health Dept. came back with a letter that said three point seven five across either filter. Limited periods seven point five mgd ok, but they still rated the plant at three point seven five because the ten state standard which they used, said you have to rate the plant with one filter out of service ok, so that is the basis of the three point seven five. You can see from these results six million gallons a day we are below, way below the State standard that takes effect three or four months from now. Three point seven five is right here and you can see that we can perform far in excess of what the Health Dept. rates it at. But it is just a simple situation that we have two filters and they rate you with one out of service. Frankly if you add one more filter you can bring your plant up to five mgd at least they would probably go back to the pre-filtration portion of the plant and they would stop at five. So, that is where the three seven five comes from we designed the plant for five, I submit to you that the plant works at flows of five and at excess of five. So, that is the situation. Here is ten mpg up here and we are going to propose five mpg in addition which brings the plant capacity up to here. Here is fifteen mpg up here. Now, this represents 1974 to 1993 we are proposing here, this is fifteen. We looked at the facilities proposed in 1987 and again in '88 and again in '89 our recommendation really isn't much different than it was back then. We feel that we can upgrade the plant and addition five mgd and the minute we add one of those two filters that we are proposing we take care of this three point seven five problem. We have got the plant up to ten now and we feel that, that is adequate. That, that is far enough ahead to bring the plant, I mean look at the gap here in terms of use, we think that is adequate. Ok, we arrive at that number, what we did was we took 1992, we took the average flow which is two point seven, excuse me we actually went back to 1991 because there were higher flows then. We took that average flow at three then we looked at the '92 data and we took the ratio of the maximum month to the average flow and came up with the number we thought would be the maximum month in the year 2012 and then we multiplied that by a factor that was a ratio between the maximum day and the maximum month then we added in flows that we got from Mike Brandt for three communities the Village of Hudson Falls, the Town, Village of Fort Edward I believe, Mike? Supervisor Brandt -yea Mr. Kestner-ok, and they represented numbers that was all they wanted us to commit to selling for the next twenty years as I understand it. We came up with a number that was a little bit higher than ten ok, and we looked at two factors. One, are numbers at that point are based on unlimited water use are firm's philosophy is that if you look at these plant production numbers you could trim these high flows very simply by instituting a very limited modest level of water conservation. This has been done in a number of communities around New York State something as simple as everybody with an odd number address waters one day and everyone with an even number address waters the next. Ok, it does not result in any detrimental affect for the lawns it has been instituted the Town of Glenville everybody has nice green lawns down there. But what it does is trims the peaks. Now let me show you what the affect of that kind of a thing is. If you take about a third of the customers in Queensbury and everybody goes home and they tum a hose on you are generating something in a relationship of ten thousand gallons a minute. Ok, that is higher than both high lift pumps running full capacity. That is more than equivalent of a major fire in the center of town. It is frankly a hell of a lot of water being used. If you do that we would look for, this is a very conservative reduction of about a ten percent decrease in flow. I think it is going to be much greater, because our experience in other communities is that the peaks drop significantly. There is no detrimental affect you just do not have to look at a real high peak flow. It is philosophy, the Board has to either accept it or reject it. But, it is done, and I think it makes sense, let me tell you why. I put the sewers in the center part of Town, one of the major costs in putting the sanitary sewers in was getting rid of the ground water, we pumped almost every contract. Millions of gallons of water, you go down to the center part of town where some very expensive lovely homes are and they have automatic sprinkling systems they run even when it rains out. The ground water table is about four or five feet below it is all sand and gravel. So, if these people want to water their lawns then can drive a point in and they can get all the water they want. Does it make sense, this is a question for the Board, does it make sense to take water out of the Hudson low lift pump it add chemicals, rapid mix it flocculate it, clarify it, filter it, adding chemicals all the time you are doing it, up it into a high lift clear well, fire it up to the tank put it through the transmission distribution system and spray it on the ground with a turbidity of point one. That is something to consider, obviously the grass does not need drinking water quality water, and so with a limited amount of water conservation we are very comfortable with a ten mgd addition and it cost six million dollars so that is our proposal basically. Mr. Mark Kestner-I think the other aspect of it right now, we have seen a report where the water, the water loss figure in Queensbury right now is about 31% of production and I know the Town Water Dept. is conducting a leak survey but we would anticipate with a successful leak survey that you could bring that number down from thirty one to perhaps fifteen percent or even lower thereby saving that capacity. So, I think whenever you look at how you are going to size a plant you have got to look at what is my sales figures vs my production figures that is one thing to look at. I think there is some room for movement on that particular issue. What we are proposing a ten mdg plant basically a six million dollars that is about half of what the eleven point seven five mdg plant of twelve million dollars is. How can we do that? We are the original designers of the plant and we do feel that we can incorporate now replacing all of the pumps in the low lift intake building, not doing away with the existing high lift pump station we feel that we can affect better utilization of the existing control building that you have in terms of additional storage that is needed for chemicals. We can do some things with that particular building. I think it is important to remember that back when this plant was constructed the Town had to purchase the land there was a large transmission contract that went along with it there are some things that are nice to do it is just like buying an automobile, there are some things that are nice to have in it and then there are things that are absolutely needed to have in it. What was done at that time was what was need and I think that was borne out by the production figures and the facts that it has consistently met the Health Dept. standards. So, I think with that. Mr. Quentin Kestner-I did not answer your question specifically you asked me about forty two times when it exceed the three point seven five. Here every day that it exceed three point seven five ok, now this part right here is finished water turbidity and there is the standard so how did we do the forty two times we went over the three point seven five? We did very well water quality wise. It was not a problem. Mr. Thomas Philo-Could you explain that to us so we could see it too? Mr. Kestner-Yes, Want me to bring that over here? ... The yellow ...this is the flow in excess of three point seven five and we label them you can see. Four point 0, four point two, four point 0 reading whatever this is every day it went over the three point seven five, frankly I do not consider that too serious a problem but there it is. Here's the water standard that kicks in, in 1993 right here, here is the finished water turbidity. So, even though we exceed this three point seven five we did not come close to not hitting the water standard. Unknown-Not many days over seven million though? Mr. Kestner-Not last year in '92 they had, they had some flows the year before that were seven point four, I think the finish water turbidity was point one eight, well below the point five. Unknown-Was that before you made the change into the new system? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Bruce that was before we starting adding soda ash wasn't it? Unknown-So even before you improved that rate of quality you were still getting excellent quality according to even the one point zero level that was taken in. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-As long as we can operate both filters and both clarifiers. Mr. Ostrander-Don't get completely hung up on turbidity there are other standards that we have to meet. Our problem is when you look at raw water turbidity isn't that high we have more of a colored water than turbidity water and our problem will be the THM's... Mr. Mark Kestner-We have looked at THM's and basically the water meets the current standards Mr. Quentin Kestner-The standard right now is what one hundred parts per billion. Mr. Ostrander-That is definitely going to decrease we are not sure to what level, depending on where it goes... Mr. Quentin Kestner-But you meet it now. Mr. Ostrander-today, but the standard... Mr. Mark Kestner-I feel that maybe it will go down as low as 50 and I believe the yearly averages are below that. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Currently our average is just below 50 in the low 40's. So our annual average is forty four, if the new standard goes to fifty we will meet that standard but its, but from an operational standard it is dangerously close to that standard. If the standard goes below fifty we will not meet the standard unless we modify our treatment. Unknown-What is the treatment? Mr. Mark Kestner-Trihelomethane is an chlorine organic it is something that you ... the point here is you currently meet the standard that the standard is halved you would still meet it and we agree that there are other considerations, one thing is we talk about this plant flow going up and I think the people have the idea that the quality goes down in otherwords the colored glass of drinking water you look at and in just plan fact doesn't. Mr. Ostrander-I would also like to consider the fact that water in the summer is much easier to treat than it is in the winter. Mr. Quentin Kestner-But the only point we are trying to make is I think there has been a lot of focus on high flows, high flow does not necessarily mean a bad water quality. ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-Let me make it very clear about what we are proposing here, we agree that additional facilities should be built, now, in my report I indicated a two phase approach. Phase one we want to put in a new low lift and a new high lift pump and we want to add two banks of filters. If we got authority to do that we could have the pumps in by the summer and the filters in not later than a year from now. Ok, we think that should be done. We are not saying that this plant should be left alone. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-To clarify this in my mind what you would propose would be to add two additional filters to be similar to the ones that we have. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yes, that is right, sixteen foot wide two of them seventy foot long sixteen inches deep. Ok. To rate it at three point seven five million gallons a day by the Health Dept. and so that is a comfortable rating to come up to ten mgd. That is about two point three and we would be using about two point one so we would be below the rating of the filters are right now. Mr. Mark Kestner-There would also be a clear well installed. Mr. Quentin Kestner-There would be a four hundred thousand gallon clear well underneath the filters it would be a unit very similar to the unit that exists. Yes, Nick. Councilman Caimano-I did some work on this report, you are going to add two Mr. Quentin Kestner-We are going to basically take and add the same capacity in terms of rapid mix, flocculation and clarifiers that you have in the same capacity and filters. Councilman Caimano- Two sixteen by one tens. Mr. Quentin Kestner-No, two sixteen by seventy, you know why it was at one ten years ago? Councilman Caimano- Why? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Because they were talking about a point one standard. Ok. We do not have to worry about that any more it is point five, if you want to plan a one hundred and ten foot long filter you can but frankly with that particular mechanism. Councilman Caimano- That is why I am asking you for a direction on your report. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Well, things have changed and I want to emphasis that the Health Dept. was talking about a point one at that time now they are talking about a point five you do not need as much filter capacity. Councilman Caimano-So you are talking about sixteen by seventies. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Thank is correct. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Two filters, two more clarifiers, flocculators.. Mr. Quentin Kestner-A high lift pump and low lift pump and then obviously you got a sludge disposal problem and we took the equipment that the '91 report but basic cost that the '91 report put in and we added those to ours. We also put in two hundred thousand dollars for improvements to chemical feed systems. Ok. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Obviously the instrumentation that goes along with that. Mr. Quentin Kestner-We have a budget I think of about a half a million dollars for electrical instrumentation. I do not necessarily and I have not studied it and I am not going to jump in and say that you ought to spend four hundred thousand dollars on instrumentation but there is enough money in that to up date those portions of the instrumentation that you probably feel are critical. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-So you end up with assuming everything is operational, four filters and four clarifiers. Mr. Quentin Kestner-That is right. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-With the States redundancy if you knock one of those out you have the three. Mr. Quentin Kestner-You would have, you would be over ten mgd with the three filters ok. The media could be sand or sand anthracite I mean that is discussion point. Mr. Mark Kestner-One thing we do want to stress, is that these facilities have to be paid for by the customers that are using the water when the plant comes on line. It is very well to say you get so many cents per thousand gallons of production but that implies that somebody is actually buying that water, that when the plant comes on line you are selling so much water with so much plant and the existing people that are paying the water bills have to pay for that. That guy that hooks up ten years from now he, the water rate may go down as the total production goes up but you have to keep in mind that you got to, the Comptroller allows you to put into the reports for their review the actual people that are on the ground tonight. So in any of these plant expansions you have to be sure that the monies spent when spread amongst the existing users makes sense. If you are not selling the water between ten and fifteen you can not ask the people in the year 1994 to pay for that. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Any other questions? Councilman Monahan-Quentin did you give us a need sheet on what the proposed costs are? Mr. Quentin Kestner-I did not yet Betty. I have got it and I will. Councilman Monahan-Because, I am looking back at '88 and I find some omission in it. Mr. Quentin Kestner-What do you mean? Councilman Monahan-Well, I the six million six hundred and sixty four thousand dollars I do not see anything in that one as there was in your '87 for your construction contingencies or your engineering or your administration. Mr. Quentin Kestner-What I have done is that I have added that into each individual unit, Betty, OK. So they are project costs for each item. Councilman Monahan-Not really ok, I will tell you. Mr. Quentin Kestner-I will tell you why I did that, because people get confused sometimes you tell them what the construction costs is then that is the cost, well that isn't the costs obviously there is about a thirty five percent markup over and above construction costs and what I have leamed to do is take the cost of the unit and show the project costs. Then everybody looks at putting in a filter putting in a high lift pump whatever that is the project costs, it makes it simple. Councilman Monahan-Well I will tell you after working for a contractor, cost accounting these kinds of things for me it is simpler the other way. You know the base cost and then figure for contingency... Mr. Quentin Kestner-Ok, in your case Betty you are probably right but the fact is when the man in the street hears a construction cost. Councilman Monahan-But, I have got to evaluate this and I need to evaluate it from base cost plus contingencies. Mr. Quentin Kestner-The base cost is the cost indicated it is multiplied by a multiplier of one point three five. Ok. Councilman Caimano-So to finish up your recommending a ten, a five and a five. Mr. Quentin Kestner-I am recommending, I am recommending a six million dollar addition which will bring this plant up to ten million gallons per day. Councilman Caimano-Rated or total? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Rated. It will be rated. The thing to understand here Nick, the minute we build one of those two new filters we have taken care of that three point seven five problem. Councilman Caimano- That is what I was doing I was running back through your numbers after you changed to sixteen by seventy and actually, that is why I asked the question, because now you have got yourself a total plant of fifteen and rated at eleven one so that's. Mr. Quentin Kestner-But remember that earlier work was based on a standard that is below what we have got now. Councilman Caimano-No, I just changed to your sixteen by seventy and redid the numbers. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-If we rebuild exactly what you just described at what point do you think based on population growth that you have looked at in the Town how long is that going to ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I think it will take you throughout the twenty years. One thing you have to remember here you know, if I looked at the data that existed in '86 or '87 and saw what was going on in the Town I would have viewed this in one perspective. Nobody is predicting the type of construction real estate expansion etc. that they were in the mid 80's in 1993 at least not that I know of not around here. I think you have to take a look at what has happened in the last two or three years you have to be reasonable. These big planned unit developments and some of these build outs some of those numbers that were generated in the 80's it's cooled off. The economy I do not think, that is my opinion, and this is the decision the Board has to make I mean are we going to see what was going on in the mid 80's or are we going to see what is going on now? I think it makes more sense to look at what is going on now because we have got a series deficit problem and there is a number of factors I am not an economist but if I had to take my quess and frankly lets face it is only a guess it is an educated guess, it is an intelligent look we always planned to add five mgd increments and I think that is a very prudent thing to do right now. Add a five mgd increment, it takes care of any immediate problems and as far as I am concerned if that rate of growth continues as it is in the last three to four years then you are ok for the next about twenty years and it is something that you have got to monitor. I feel the five mgd additions should have been done in the mid eighties and it wasn't. Supervisor Brandt-What if you saw high rates of growth for some unknown reason can you take what it would cost or how would you go in a modular to take it from ten to fifteen million gallons. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Well, first of all at that point, I would look at the performance of the stuff that I have because they may rate my filters up to three gallon per square foot per minute and if they do that my filters are going to be rated for fifteen million gallons that I am putting in now, so it is going to be based on performance. You may have to expand some portions of the plant that depends on a lot of factors where the water standards are somebody mentioned THMS it depends on a number of factors. But, I think you have to base your design on reasonable projections you can equipment, you can add modules as the need dictates this is something you can do that has been a little bit difficult to do in this Town but it can be done as the need dictates. I think that to go any higher than this you are not going to need, you have got a lot of white space here on this graph and that is the reason why I did it, I wanted everyone to understand this is what is going on here. You have got some growth capacity here ok, there was a little bit of what I call intelligent water conservation you do not have to worry about these occasional spikes, that is lawn sprinkling that is not essential water use. Fire flows are more than adequate the essential water production is there. Supervisor Brandt-The plant that we have, we have two filters you are saying you are going to four filters and you feel you will get a rating often million gallons per day, right now we are running as much as seven, to seven point four. Mr. Quentin Kestner-We have run seven point four through the plant, I do not want you to think that we could do this every day I am not suggesting that and also remember that the water quality is better in the summer and that is important think to remember. Supervisor Brandt-But if we got into fourteen million gallons need in spikes we could meet it. Mr. Quentin Kestner-You could meet it. Supervisor Brandt-With what you are proposing on occasion and if there was a problem a breakdown of a filter then you would have to restrict lawn sprinkling and you would still take care of all of the domestic water consumption easily. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Easily Councilman Caimano-Wait, we are making a rash assumption here though, you are making an assumption that you can add the modules on and there will be no hydraulic loss, there will be no other problems in the plant so therefore we will just take these numbers and multiply them. I think that is a rather rash statement, no? Mr. Quentin Kestner-What do you mean? Councilman Caimano- Y ou are going to add just filters, one cascade filter one to the other and just say we are going to double our capacity? Is there, are there no problems with that, no hydraulic problems of where you put the things and how the water flows? Mr. Quentin Kestner-When we designed this Nick, Mr. Mark Kestner-the same height as the existing filter, when you design the plant you lift the water from here and you put it up in the air here and you go thorough the plant and you end up in the clear well. What we are saying we are going to take more water lift it the same height and ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-We have got all kinds of hydraulic capacity through the plant we designed it to take fifteen mgd we designed it for that problem you spoke about, it is not a problem, it is very little head loss to the water plant frankly. Mr. Mark Kestner-similar facility, we are not..we are talking about taking more water lifting it the same height. Councilman Caimano-It is not what? Mr. Quentin Kestner-There is not a lot of head loss through a water plant. Councilman Caimano-Ok Mr. Quentin Kestner-We considered that, in otherwords this plant was put in we have block walls where we got to knock out the concrete, we thought about this back in the 70's. You knock out a block wall you add a pipe tunnel, you knock out a block wall you add a channel for the filters its we thought about those things. Mr. Mark Kestner-On the original drawings there are locations for these additional filters, and clarifiers are shown. Mr. Quentin Kestner-So hydraulically we are ready to go, now one thing hydraulically is that depending on where the growth is you have got to look at your distribution system your transmission system and before you make commitments to sell water to people in various locations you have to look, you have to produce it now you have to deliver it. Ok, you can deliver ten mgd but I think you have to look at that various places where you plan on delivering this water you may need to upgrade some of your distribution and transmission systems and that is a legitimate costs and that is a cost you have to consider. There is no sense raising the plant up to fifteen mgd if you cannot deliver the product, efficiently to the customers. Unknown-A question on the clear well as it exists ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-yes I am sure. Mr. Thomas Philo-You were the original engineers? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yes we were sir. Mr. Thomas Philo-In 1974 didn't say that this plant was designed for fifteen million? Mr. Quentin Kestner-No What we said it was designed for five with incremental expansions of five up to fifteen. Mr. Mark Kestner-...back in the 70's my father, we have been in business thirty five years, have worked on Town water supplies right on through it we look at those facilities such as like river intakes and they should really be sized to take what you think the maximum would be, so those facilities were put in for fifteen. All right the pipe between the intake building and the plant itself ok can take the fifteen. So, that the answer to your question then if you were here back then you probably heard that ok, there are certain facilities. We do not want to go back out into the River and put another intake in so once we were out there, those facilities were sized that way. Mr. Quentin Kestner-We have got three pipes into the River and each one of them is sized for five. Mr. Mark Kestner-That is why when we upgrade it ok, when we go to ten we can use that without modification. So, we are utilizing facilities in the plant without modification and they are designed for fifteen. That is basically I think if you saw fifteen it is true and it made sense you do not want to be back out in the river. It is terribly expensive once you are there do whatever you want to do and get out... Mr. Quentin Kestner-The cost to put a pipe line in a trench is 90% excavation so you go out in the River and you do it once and that is what we did. Today, I would not want to have to go back out into that River with all the permits you would have to get. You would be five years trying to get permission to do that. Mr. Thomas Philo-The way I understood it this plant was designed for fifteen million and they said adding on a couple little things like your pit as you said. Mr. Mark Kestner-adding on the filters and Mr. Quentin Kestner-the clarifiers, and I am sorry the pumps too Mr. Mark Kestner-we are adding on the clarifiers and adding the pumps. Mr. Quentin Kestner-It was planned to be increased in five mdg increments up to fifteen. Mr. Thomas Philo-If these pumps were kept up tuned up and the proper maintenance done on it can you change the impeller size on that pump? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yes you can, sure you can. Mr. Thomas Philo-That was what I was instructed. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yes you can Mr. Thomas Philo-It is a lot less than buying a pump? Mr. Quentin Kestner-It is about nine thousand vs fifty or sixty. Mr. Thomas Philo-Nine Thousand Dollars Mr. Quentin Kestner-It cost Nine thousand bucks to take one of those high lifts and give it a complete rebuild, I called a rep. sent him the specs and asked him what it would cost to rehab the pumps. Mr. Thomas Philo-When was the last time these pumps were preventative maintenance on it? Mr. Quentin Kestner-You mean a major rehab? Major rebuild? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-On the pump itself? Mr. Quentin Kestner-On the pumps themselves. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Nothing on the pumps, the motors have been rebuilt. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Eighteen years ago. Mr. Mark Kestner-What we are saying in the lower lift building there has been some representation ...the pumps have been in there for seventeen years without any maintenance whatsoever ok, so we do plan on doing those sorts of scheduled maintenance on those facilities but not replace all the ... Mr. Thomas Philo-Do you have a maintenance program set up for this plant like those pumps, the pumps in the construction I used they got to be tuned up every year. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Well we got seventeen years out of them and we are get water out so what we are saying in the upgrade rather than to replace the pump we are going to call for a rebuilt. Councilman Caimano-We are getting into some technicalities here if you are finished with the major presentation we... Mr. Thomas Philo-I have one more question. Councilman Monahan-I have one more question of Quentin too. Quentin we have talked about the slow down in the growth of housing development and you know frankly housing development can break this town. But, what this Town has been trying to do is get industry into this Town and I realize that we are competing with all the other forty nine states in this union. But, what we have been able to say to industry we can offer you unlimited water resources and that is very important to some industries. What would you be able to say to an industry with the plan that you have there? Could you still make that commitment? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yes, I could make that statement because I am trying to draw a difference between essential use and I think filling a demand of an industry is an essential use. Now, I have to balance that with a concept do I have to water my lawn every night is that of essential use, ok, I am drawing a difference between those two things you are going to find that a lot of industries do not use a lot of water and an industry around here if they were going to locate and use a lot of water they would go right to the river, just like the Hercules Paint and Powder Company did when they located if they had to use a lot of water they are going to take care of themselves I would suspect. Mr. Mark Kestner-If an industry comes in you could contract with them for so much water and you could add a module depending on the size of the industry but you can add that module on the ground today because you have to bill the people that are using the water today for the future industry. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Betty, look you have got to Mr. Mark Kestner-Someone has got to pay for that if you will reserve capacity and unless you have a contract to sell that reserve capacity you are going to ask the existing taxpayers to go for it. Mr. Quentin Kestner-You have got a lot of space here Betty, I think we can say to any industry, I do not know do you have one that's planning to come in that is a major water user? Supervisor Brandt -We had in inquiry but it dried up, it was a major user and it needed treated water but that's gone but like you say you limit lawn sprinkling and you could certainly take care of the major one. I think that was only a half a million gallons a day. Mr. Mark Kestner-Was it a soda manufacturer perhaps. Supervisor Brandt-No. Mr. Mark Kestner-We did ...he needed drinking water but frankly the industry was getting very conscious now of water reuse standards and things like that so the days of I need millions and millions of gallons of water these guys are getting very ... Mr. Ralph VanDusen-You were talking about the possible sale of water to other communities what was the ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I got the number here Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Just the total Mr. Quentin Kestner-One point seven million, that was the numbers that I was given. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-In '89 we projected a peak day twenty years from now of just for the Queensbury, Consolidated Water Dist. of twelve point three million. Mr. Quentin Kestner-That was based on growth factors at the time...unlimited water use, ok. unlimited water use I made that very clear in that report and I said right in the front of that report that I felt that the Board ought to institute some kind of water conservation. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-So, if we built a ten million and we were to sell to the three communities we subtract one point seven which would go to the other communities that would leave eight point three... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I have got the numbers right here. Mr. Mark Kestner-We are also anticipating that you cut down on the lost water... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I have got the numbers right here Mr. Ralph VanDusen-So, far a major leak on a private line looks like maybe one hundred and eighty thousand gallons a day and we have done roughly half the system. Unknown-How many gallons are you loosing a day? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-The leak on the Queensbury system we have done roughly half our system so far and this is approximately ...we have a draft report of the first third of the system relatively few leaks I think they found three leaks in forty five miles they did of our system, they started the second third of the system they are roughly halfway through that we have found a few leaks in hydrants the largest one I think in our system is ten gallons per minute. We found one leak on a private water line the person doing the leak survey for us estimated that at a hundred and twenty five gallons per minute and that comes out to about one hundred and eighty gallons Unknown-Where was it going? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-The water main is about this far from a storm sewer it is going from that directly into the storm sewer into a brook the owner of the property has been instructed to correct the leak right away, we have been assured that they will. Specially it is the water line for Canterbury Woods. Mr. Mark Kestner-Queensbury in the water business has relatively new distribution, it is not an established old city along the Hudson if you will that has lines that are very, very old. When you see a loss of 31 % in the system like that, that is something you should look at and I give the credit for taking a look at it, but we would expect that you could get that down to at least in half and probably bring it down even below that if you account for maybe known uses of water, your fire or municipal buildings or whoever doesn't have meters. Its something that needed to be looked and I believe they are looking at it but we do anticipate and it sounds like Ralph is having success at it. Mr. Quentin Kestner-I would like to make a couple of points, Ralph asked me about my maximum day Queensbury was eight point two two four nine 0 two and if you can get your water use down to ten or fifteen percent leaks unaccounted for it is going to save four hundred and fifty thousand gallons a day that is a substantial use. You want to keep your unaccounted for water down to about ten or fifteen percent that is pretty typical, that is even high for a lot of communities you do not want to be running at 30% I think they have been very smart to look into why they have a 30% figure. Hans Hank-So far you do not even come close to that do you in your analysis, you probably have less than 5% losses detected on the area that you have checked so far wouldn't you say? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Roughly the area we have seen so far is a couple hundred thousand gallons a day, our average last year was point seven or two hundred thousand gallons.... we have gone through roughly half our system. Our goal was, we felt just doing the leak survey our goal was to get the 30% down to about 15% we have done half the system roughly...the person doing the survey of the first third said they had been doing leak survey for I guess fifteen to twenty years, and ours was the tightest system he has seen so far. Mr. Hank-How long is the 31 % how long has that been existing as a loss, a year or two years, three years? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-1 don't know, within our own, within the operation of the Queensbury Water Dept. the person who used to be responsible for billing was the person who kept track of the gallons that we sold. From an operation standpoint we knew how many gallons we pumped out of the plant the person doing the billing was keeping track of gallons, she was not able within the computer program, if she, time to keep track of gallons that we had sold thorough meter, we have only been doing our own billing on computer for two and a half years, three years, she left the Town about six months ago and since then we have been able to modify the changes so we are now keeping track of that. So, it is a relatively new thing in the history of the Queensbury Water Dept. that we can honestly say that we can.... Mr. Ostrander-One of the things for Quentin to keep in mind if we are going to keep our own water pumps we mention the fact that ..flow control is pumping against the partially closed valve,..keep that in mind. We would rather not keep the...at the head. Mr. Thomas Philo-How come you have to have a pump on the simi closed valve, you restriction your head, electrical cost and everything is a lot higher am I right? How is it designed why do you have to pump it against the, why couldn't they put a valve in ... Mr. Ralph VanDusen-The way it is designed now is you have two different size pumps the original design the small pump was wide open would pump three million gallons a day the other two would pump five million gallons a day wide open. If you happen to be using water at a rate of three million gallons a day you could tum on that one pump open the valve and run wide open and it would go fine if you happen to be using water at a rate of five million you could pick one of the other and it would, the valve could be wide open the reality of it is at times we need that exact amount are pretty few and far between so what we have to do we have to follow that slow down in the system that we have now is designed to use a butterfly valve to create a higher head to reduce the flow. Mr. Mark Kestner-What we plan to do was to put in a variable speed drive on one pump that we are adding to the intake that way we can match you know your demand with the pumping capacity. The difference is we are not replacing... Mr. Thomas Philo-that is why I was saying why are you using a... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I absolutely agree with you but back in 1974 the reliability of variable speed drives that were available was far inferior to what is available today. They have got some great reliable variable speed drives now. Any clutch drives and things like that, that were available back in the seventy's we put them in waste water treatment plants and we have replaced all of them. I agree with you. Councilman Caimano- Y our answer is yes Tom. The answer to your question is yes. Mr. Quentin Kestner-We are going to put in variable speed pumps and any new pump probably ought to be variable speed. Mr. Mark Kestner-The distinction is we are not doing three pumps down there we are doing one. We are rehabing the other two. Supervisor Brandt-From O'Brien and Gere Mr. Tony Geiss- (Used Charts) Back in the late 80's and 90's we started developing say 1990 we developed a report that you have in front of you and the object of the report is to look at what you had and look at the project of what your flows were, what the facilities were and make some projections into the future both projections of flow and projections of facilities. And looking at that as a snap shot for the 1990, 1991 we had come up with in fact I guess one particular point was regionalization was a point at that time and we contacted many of the surrounding, in fact one of our duties was to contract all the surrounding areas and we had several meetings with the surrounding people the communities and what their projections were for flow. At that time if we looked ...the twenty five years for flow the ultimate build out was twenty nine point something million gallons a day, if everybody came in. When we had meetings everybody was interested initially and they came down. What you see in the report are the people that were interested at the time the report was done. How many signed up, none as of today. Ok. How many are interested? I think Kestner referenced that there is Fort Edward, the Village and Town, Hudson Falls possibly Moreau no commitment there at all but they have some water problems that may, this may be a solution for them and Kingsbury who is already under contract, I should say they are under contract but they are relatively small flow for this whole project and the Town of Queensbury itself. Looking at what we are discussing today I think it is very critical to look at two major items and I think we have talked about those in detail as we, with the first presentation. I think flows probably are the first the primary concern where are the flows today, what are the flows today and what are we expected to see. The second concerns are what facilities have to be modified, have to be added to this treatment plant to give you the capacity you want? I think capacity is the first issue, what do you need, what flows do you want to project for. A little difference we projected to twenty five years ok, we did not project ten we didn't project twenty, we got a twenty five year projection based on and the numbers here were from 1991 when we had the report. We also looked at when you build facilities you got to build them to what you are bonding for. So, if you are going to project for twenty years, you need to bond for twenty years you are going to project for twenty five years your need, you can bond for twenty five years but you do not want to be going to twenty years and having bonded for twenty five your facilities you are going to run out. You do not have to, when you do expand, you do not want to look five years into the future you want to look further on into the future because it does cost money to expand. Dollars yes, for the user but you are paying for them both with use, the water use rate as well as an advelorum in your system here. One of the things we looked at and as I pointed out we had water looked at water and a couple things I have got to add here we had looked at water I guess from everybody, Fort Edward, the Town the Village, Hudson Falls, Kingsbury, Lake George, the Village of Lake George, Moreau, Queensbury, Wilton and the City of Glens Falls. Well when we go out twenty five years I guess Glens Falls comes right out of the picture they do not want, they are going to go by themselves. At the time though when we did this report they did not make a decision. Wilton, a little pie in the sky. They are not going to come in. Lake George when they found out what the transmission cost were they are not going to come in. They got a major transmission line to build, very interested in the cost of water but they want to know if the Town was going to build the transmission line to them and when we said no it is going to come to this point you have got to build the rest so you have Lake George here that are not included. Then you go to the remaining facilities and got about the one point seven that Kestner recommended basically the latest communication from these communities uses point two and I am looking at twenty, twenty fifteen projections point two from the Town of Fort Edward, one point 0 from the Village of Fort Edward and one point 0 from the Village of Hudson Falls. Looking at a point two four mgd from the Town of Kingsbury approximately the existing water districts are, would be in this range here for Moreau. Now, this, that is an if, iffy situation. You are a solution for a law suit down there. Will it happen, I guess there has been one contact but no other contact after that, I do not know what they are doing when they are moving. But that's a lot that is not a definite no it is no way a yes but it is not a definite no. And our projection and I left is just as is of ten point one four this adds up to thirteen point eight eight. That is looking at. Supervisor Brandt-That is peak? I can not see it from here. Mr. Geiss-I am sorry. I got some sheets, Rick would you hand out the top sheets there? Supervisor Brandt-Are these parallel then what is in the book? Mr. Geiss-Those are numbers I am correcting that are in the book at that updates since the report was published. Ok. In fact what I did is this sheet looks a little different but it is actually the same table ok, right from the book, right from the book is what I used and I crossed out where the changes where. Ok. So, that you could see where we were and what has changed since the report was done. When cost went out to the communities they said we did not need that much flow or we are not looking at that much growth. When we did the report we had letters from all the communities telling, in fact that is how we established flows. We went to them and asked them for their flows. We asked them what do you project into the future we are projecting for twenty five years what is your projection? What would you be willing to buy? Well since the report is out we have had several meetings with communities trying to tie them in several meetings looking at what their costs would be and in do things that they said no we have got a change in flow here we got a little bit less we didn't meet that. We don't want to buy quite as much because you are asking them to buy in now into the construction cost and in fact we looked at the construction costs is that the Town of Queensbury paid for what you have got. Why should you pay in the expansion these people are going to have to pay their fair share in the expansion plus some because you have already got something here. Councilman Monahan-Tony, excuse me in this report you just gave us Glens Falls is not crossed off I am assuming from the totals it should have been crossed off. Mr. Geiss-It should have been. It should have been in fact a line should have gone all the way through all of these where I crossed them off here you should have a line through Lake George all the way across both the Village and the Town a line through Wilton and a line through Glens Falls. They are not in the total of thirteen point eight, eight. I apologize for that. I had my hand written copy has that on it and in fact my marketing department did a much better job on this chart than I really wanted, I wanted the original table to be very honest with you so you could see the original table and where the cross off were right from the report and they made it a little fancier than I needed. But, this really the ten point one four is using the projections of the communities that we started discussing and in fact Mike referenced, that are the communities still there. These are in the ten point one four I didn't look at how that could be trimmed that might well be trimmed by a few mgd or a mgd say in fact the twenty year projection that I just heard was eight point three mgd. I am working with a twenty five year here. Not much different, very close, what are your projected flows? If you take the Town of Moreau out of this facility you are down to twelve and a half mgd, roughly. If you look at maybe the community the build out or the building within the Town of Queensbury here that might be over by an mgd, I didn't I have not spent a lot of time trying to redo this that is why I left it here. What I wanted to show you this was to say the picture we have then now looks like this and I think there was a confusion when we were up in January is where is todays picture. The picture is not this picture of twenty nine is not here any more. That was looking at a regional facility. This picture now if we look at the best facility and looking at the outside users coming in you are looking at thirteen point eight eight. If we keep Queensbury at my first projection with all the communities coming in and the growth that we saw you would be at ten point one four plus Kingsbury. Don't sell any other water to anybody you are talking just over ten. So you may well be below ten, in actuality today if you do not look at the developments that you have in the past. So, really settling on a flow I think is the most critical thing, if you are looking at a ten mgd facility a eleven mgd facility you need to look then I think becomes very critical on what is going in with your existing plant. I guess there is one point here to before I leave flows the charts here we looked at several years of data, we looked at all the years of data that we looked at and the white area that was referenced here and the other uses when you are operating a water system that white area that you have you can compensate for that by providing treatment capacity or storage capacity. Storage capacity here is relatively small but it is expensive to build, expensive to provide for. Ok, because you need to put it on to the high service area or you need to put in stand pipes to provide it in the other pressure zones. Providing the plant to provide the peaking out of the facility was what was originally scheduled what was originally viewed at and therefore the peaking plant is where it is done. Now, this is not unusual this is a method of operation that you look at in operating a plant. Now, the peaks, the small peaks you can take from some storage that is one reasonable way of doing it, you need a lot more storage though to meet the peaks that you are talking about here. Even these few little days you needed in the range of a days use of something like that to operate and cut the peaks off. So, you are looking at the other method is doing that. Water restriction that was referenced many times, yes, water restriction has been used in many communities. It has been used at an emergency basis in all those communities, in fact I must reference the water restriction probably the biggest water restriction is raise rates. I have seen it in many communities, you raise rates in your water sales go down drastically. Within two years your water use is back up where it was. Looking at watering lawns, ninety five percent of your water used in a house maybe even higher is for non drinking purposes it does not even need to be treated it could be grey water for all you care. Bathing, flushing toilets, flushing toilets is one of your biggest water uses. Lawn sprinkling was picked on here because it helps set the peak in the summer time. Putting well points down and other things why haven't they been done if they are that cheap to do or that cheap to operate people to not want to do them, they do not want to do it. Ok, also there are restrictions on them doing it because you have got the water rights or the rights to serve them water within the community through DEe. That is one of the things who you are serving and what area you are serving that is part of your withdrawal permission of getting water from the river. But, ninety five percent of the water used in the house you don't have to drink, actually for all the water you really drink and cook with you could bring bottles of water in for that matter. That is not what your constituents here are used to having and that is the problem, that is not what we are all use to having. I am part and party to this where I live and that is what we grew up having water available. Water restrictions as I started to say have a periodic thing that have worked when they are needed on an emergency basis. Very difficult though on a continuous basis. So, you have got to really institute if you really are serious on water restrictions you have got to look at are you willing to put out control shower or reduced shower flows are you willing to tell people to start putting in the smaller flow toilets. These are the things too in addition to the lawn sprinkling bans because you are telling people you cannot do something now, they can't wash their car the can't do this, that's very difficult in what I have talked to other communities the emergency part of that is where it has happened in the past the continuous part the question that always gets asked of an engineer is how can we stop having these bans. How can we get back to the operation that we had. Now, that may not be the answer for the 90's but that is something that I think you as a Board have got to be ready to say. If you are ready to stand up and tell people that is how then the water, you can change these water projection numbers drastically in that way. Ok, I do not disagree with what they had to say but you have got to be ready to do that and you've got to be ready to say and that is a philosophy change that you have got to be ready to do. Ok, totally different and you got to change people's minds and maybe even say if you put a shower in or a shower head in there is a benefit to that or we supply the shower heads and you put them in. You have got to make sure they are in too. Got to make sure the water ban is, people are not washing their cars or watering their lawns which is a summer peaks. But you have got to answer too is the community down the road why do they do it and why don't they do it? That is a philosophy the Board really needs to have and it can be done, but it is awful hard to say. Looking then I guess, water quality was discussed here this plant is doing a very good job. The plant is meeting well below, back in '75 turbidity requirements. It is putting out very good water. It is taking in you have got a good raw water quality compared to some other sources very good raw water quality you have spikes which happens in the spring the spring runoff. But the finish water quality of this plant is very good. The turbidity that has been referenced that is going in effect in '93 is the absolute date. That was really a turbidity known and put into the regs as in '88 or '89 that it got reduced from one point 0 to point five. It also got put in there that they had to do the recording of turbidity. It is turbidity prior to final treatment if you do any adjustment with soda ash or other things to look at your corrosion control in your system that is the turbidity just prior to that. But it was instituted then and plants were given time to do the work to get it into effect, they may have had to add, reduce their capacity on their existing filters in other words add more filters whatever they had to do the state says get going because now the turbidity limit is going to go into affect. So, actually that was something known many years ago and in looking at that and several other water quality perimeters were referenced, THM's trihelomethane, chloroform, chlorinated other organic, chloroform being about ninety five to ninety eight percent of the trihelomethane reading. That has been proposed its right now at a hundred parts per billion. It has been proposed to do down to fifty or twenty five, in fact that reg itself has gotten itself tied up in todays economy, because it was going to go down. It was going to go down a year ago or so. The cost of what the affect of that going down was and really looking back at the risk was evaluated and right now they call it the reg neg process. Regulation Negotiation is going on it is the first time that has happened with EP A All these regs that I am referencing is driven by EP A, they are not by the State. The state is not the bad guy any more the Federal Government thorough EP A and Congress has regulated what our regs are going to be. They have said every three years EP A you come up with twenty five new standards, it didn't say you needed twenty five new standards it says you have to have twenty five new standards. You have to increase the existing standard, reduce the level in otherwords, increase the quality coming out or come up with a new regulation. They did not tell them they had to be needed they just said do them. This came back out in the safe drinking water act of 1986, well this THM reg. got caught up in the cost and everybody says wait, what is the real risk. Are we changing from one hundred to twenty five for a risk from one in a thousand to one in a million or are we only switching from one in ten thousand to one in fifteen thousand and what is the cost that we are talking about to do this? So, it is going through a whole process in a committee review, but things are happening different when regs. We follow regs at O'Brien and Gere very closely because with the treatment plant design we have done we are very concerned with what is up on the horizon. We get involved with the regs both the federal and the state level and working with the State Health Dept. Gil Faustel was referenced he is retired here a couple of years ago and Jack Dunn is in charge of design and we are constantly in touch with him and his boss and his bosses boss right up to the commissioner we have had meetings to talk about these regs because they affect it. If it goes below fifty major problems in the whole New York State, a lot of people. Right now only a few don't meet the hundred you go down to fifty a lot of people are meeting it. Your forty four if something happens to the river quality your forty four could jump to sixty eight or something and then we have major problems how to do it. Now things on the horizon though that are very close to you are zebra muscle control for your intake the contract time for disinfection, going out. You have to it is coming in, it is in place right now, it just came out in the State regs and it has been out in the Federal Regs but the State Regs just got published the first of the year on contact time. That is going to affect your clear well capacity and in fact they have got proposed ways of calculating it out and the State still has only got them proposed also corrosion control just came out in January. So now you have got a problem of disinfection going out and you got to keep corrosion control within your system. Corrosion control is lead and copper. I think you have seen at other communities. Here I believe you have got no problem, you have taken the sixty samples and you have done it and maybe two samples are above the level you meet the regulations of the ninety percentile is meeting the regs so you have no problem but I think that attributes to the current operation where they have increased the PH going out from the facility and they have also increase the alkalinity, in fact one of the things when we first came and looked at the treatment plant operation we asked in the winter are you having trouble, they said trouble flocculator trouble meeting the lower flows but getting a bigger flock how do you increase treatment and they were in the midst of trying a few things and we said here is one of the directions you really need to pursue is the soda, the soda ash addition, because it increases the alkalinity within the system. You see water chemistry is a funny thing, cold water and warm water are two different things you need to improve how you can form a flock. If you have low alkalinity the alum does not like to work in cold water and also if you have low alkalinity you get PH shifts that happen out in the system. There is no, if you remember back and I am not the water chemistry guy but, as the alkalinity reduces you lose buffering capacity in the water if you remember your buffer solution you use in chemistry class. Raise the alkalinity and that water does not change as fast is really what happens. It doesn't taste any different but it does not shift out in the system and you do not get the PH shift out in the system. Ok, so what the system has been doing has been adding soda ash to raise the alkalinity it improves the removal in the treatment plant something very cheap ok, they have been using some existing feeders we only need to put in a good soda ash feeder down at that plant they got a good solution. The operators came up and they are working with it but it is difficult to institute right now because they are working with you know a modified feeder. But, that is a solution that has kept you out of the lead and copper problems, because they raised the alkalinity they are raising the PH with caustic at the end of the facility that is giving you a higher PH, higher alkalinity solution in the system and no lead and copper problems. Believe me major, major problems you have eliminated through the operation of the plant that has just happened in the last two to three years. But, that is a reg that is going to still be a shadow around you because you still have got to continue to test for it so you have got to continue to keep your operation up. I guess looking at my notes, loss was discussed and as we are talking loss areas here, loss is a word that you have got to put a definition on. Thirty one percent everyone is hanging their hat on thirty one percent. That is a big number and I agree with everybody it should be less than thirty one percent. Back in the 70's in the 80's and even today we talk water loss. We talk unaccounted for, when we talk unaccounted for when you put those numbers out what is in all that number, you have got to be fair to the operator are they looking at the system or not are they concerned with the how can't you not see a leak, Ralph gave a good example. With a storm sewer right next to a break it never hits the surface nobody has any trouble with it and if you are not standing right over the top of it you would never hear it in fact if you are not standing over the top of it with a geo pointing down at the ground listening you may never hear it at all, something like that. You look at the storm sewer now, its ground water running in the storm sewer you cannot be sure one way or another. But, loss or unaccounted for what is unmetered, nobody was calculating whats unmetered in your system. It is being used, ok, all the town buildings, all the fire hydrants those are not losses those are just unmetered uses. But in the terms we used to use and the thirty one percent that was thrown out is all total unmetered use, it is not necessarily the fraction that is lost. That is why get down to fifteen percent yes, then that could be true loss in the system. You have so many gallons that you loose every foot of pipe, actually it works into the, it is actually the joints that are within the pipe you are allowable leakage that you have per inch diameter per mile. So, you cannot help having some true loss within the system. You have got some meter loss which is the meters your customers meters vs your flow meter at the plant. What you produce vs what you are actually selling so you have some discrepancy there. So, you never are going to agree you cannot come up with a total number. But the system itself I think what they are looking at is when you try to address that thirty one percent and I think Ralph came down to twenty some percent or whatever starting to look at defining the loss. What can he, in which portion of that should he be attacking? That is critical in looking at loss, because thirty one percent is a lot. But lets, I have worked with a lot of water system throughout the whole state and we have found, nail the guy to the wall its thirty one percent, well wait a minute how much did he actually, how much is it? Then attack, he as a portion that he can't ever touch. It is there. Some leaks he referenced what was monitored already if they went back and monitored again that half of the system or that third and then the second third I forget the numbers they may have another little leak here or there. You are into spring time you are into freeze and thaws that could change things, so you are not going to get a hundred percent of them but you are going to find the big ones. In a study like this at one hundred and twenty five gallons a minute leak you paid for the study in my opinion. Well worth it. Well worth doing well worth investigating but true loss that you are looking at you have to give a definition and then look at that portion that you can really work on. Well worth always looking at unaccounted for water. But I think it is very important to do. I think next I would like to say what, I talked about a lot of capacity issues here to start with. Somewhere as I said we are talking ten plus maybe eleven plus or minus million gallons a day is what you have actually got. That's we can argue back and forth what the exact number is. I do not think it becomes that critical when you start looking at things. Our other thing is you know, we design water treatment plants and I guess O'Brien and Gere got thirty five forty water treatment plants that we have done ourselves. Maybe seventy five percent of them or thereabouts are right in New York State here. We have done water plants from one hundred thousand gallons a day all the way up to a hundred million gallons a day right here in the State. If you want to take these ...we have done one hundred and fifty million gallons a day plants throughout I guess that is about our biggest. I have worked on modifying plants at one hundred and fifty million gallons a day over in Providence, City of Pittsburgh and other facilities, we have looked at not only building them but modifying them. But when we go into a plant and look at it we look at how is the plant operating before we look at how we can grow or how the plant can grow we look at what is going on what is the plant good for what can be done to the plant what can improve the operation if we were looking at doing something there what would improve the operation? Here what I got is a chart that in fact Rick maybe you want to pass out those other sheets, the numbers will be on these sheets. I usually do not like passing out charts while I am talking but I would like to get them out because if you cannot see these numbers I want you to be able to read what I am talking about. I have got several items stapled here. But the intake as they pointed out prior to myself you have three eighteen inch intakes, currently operating at five mgd. Future hydraulic capacity of fifteen mgd no current problems. Future problems, zebra muscle control and item that needs to be addressed when you are expanding. I think as I am going to go through these I am going to talk about what needs to be done to the treatment plant now as you expand. In fact zebra muscle control needs to be done whether you do anything out at the plant because they will shut you down. They will shut your intakes right down if you do not address them. They are not here yet they are going to be here. Councilman Monahan-How close are they Tony? Mr. Geiss-I was in Colony yesterday, Colony has a little glass cabinet out in their entrance to their water plant and these were taken from the River right out in front of the plant on the Mohawk River. They are in the Hudson how close to here I have not looked at the latest report but they are here. It will only take a boat that rides the lower Hudson to ride the upper Hudson for them to be in the water and then they proliferate very quickly. They are something that are all over the coast of Lake Ontario they are out in the deep water of Lake Ontario scares us drastically. We thought cold water was going to stop them and I cannot give you the totallatin name or whatever it is there is a US version now that is known to be out as deep as three hundred feet. They thought they did not go any deeper than thirty feet with the European version. Ok. They are allover Lake Erie is they publish a report for zebra muscle report in Lake Erie and they put a red line where they are and Lake Ontario is just a red line along the coast and there are dots on the Hudson and the Mohawk has got a red line on it but Lake Erie is a whole red lake. There you are talking they have been able to keep them where you do control a lot of times you cannot keep them off the intake themselves but you want to keep them out of the pipe. They go with yearly inspections and clean the intake yearly and they are into shoveling off the intakes. They are a major, they are going to kill your hydraulic capacity if you are ready for them. So zebra muscle control is a problem. Easy to solve, yes, in one way, no in another, trihelomethane, if you were to dose with chlorine on a continuous basis out there chlorine with organic well water organic form trihelomethanes that you cannot get removed in your plant. So, now you are danmed if you do and danmed if you don't. There are some have potassium permanganate working ok, a lot of facilities have been using that to control it, it may be a benefit here to use, we need to try a few things, cheap to try a few things. Putting a feed line out there you could feed off different solution out there and give it a try but trihelomethanes you have got to watch about the regs coming back at you because you may do something here and you are going to come hit you in the back when you are not looking. But needs to be addressed in fact that needs to be addressed whether, even if you do not build out to meet current capacity you could loose capacity with zebra muscle controls. Raw water pumping station one three mgd pump, two five mgd pumps I guess capacity I got listed as slightly less than eight mgd right now the way the pumps are operating. Hydraulic capacity you could put in three seven and a half mgd pumps in that facility so you can get a future capacity with new pumps to fifteen mgd. In fact I listened to a comment about have those pumps been maintained I guess the answer is they didn't pull the impellers and pull the pump but there has been continuous maintenance as you referenced that you do on your construction pumps they do montWy, they have a maintenance record of montWy record of doing maintenance, I mean they would not have operated seventeen years without doing the maintenance you were referencing you do not need to pull a pump and replace impellers unless there are major problems. ... Tune them up adjust them do the adjustment at the top of the pump you do not need to pull the impellers out to do. Mr. Thomas Philo-How often has that been done? Mr. Ralph VanDusen-The last time that was done was ...approximately a year ago. Mr. Geiss-The question did not get asked you asked it the answer I did not hear it come out I felt bad because maintenance is done the facility is operating great. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-Obviously, packings have been replaced Supervisor Brandt-I do not think that is the question here I sure do not want to get into that, I would sure like to look at where we are going with this plant. Mr. Geiss-Capacity, but the capacity here if you are going ten mgd, eleven mgd yes, you do not have to replace all three pumps ok, if you were doing fifteen mgd the answer here is you would have to replace the pumps to get to the fifteen mgd. But, I am pointing out you need to set this, you have got room to do what ever you need to do there very little change. Raw water transmission line is good for five mgd go to fifteen mgd no change. Rapid mix, existing rapid mix you have two good at three point seven five each, ok, rapid mix we looked at the ten state standards you have enough detention time there we found there was a chemical feed problem ok, a sensing problem with the ventures that they have too, the sensing lines were at the bottom of the venturi that clogged with sediment. We looked at the you could split flow to rapid mixes very easily when you are talking five mgd or ten mgd but when you are talking chemical flow and that's what it was doing here we had to split the chemicals. Now chemicals maybe as little as two to three gallons an hour ok, I cannot even give you the gallons per minute rate but it is being done by Box Weirs if you got a piece of dust or whatever you are going to change the chemical flow rate to the two units. So, we said when we recognized when you do something additional here you got to do a different chemical feed arrangement. In fact we looked at you may consider a new rapid mix where all the flow goes to one rapid mix and then you got the chemical dose to the flow of the system and then how you split the flow between the system whether it be two units, three units, four units you can do it. That becomes very critical. But the chemical proportion to the water has been taken care of and then if you get fifty five on one side and fortyfive in another you have got the chemical proportion also and that the flow rate could be adjusted. Clarifiers you got two clarifiers actually flocculation you got two, two stage flocculation three point seven five million gallons as day looking at the units you have got a hydraulic capacity to go up to five mgd in those, each I should say. This say five mgd each clarifier would be good for five or yea, each flocculator would be good for five mgd. Clarifiers you got two clarifiers, current capacity is the three point seven five. With the two units you have a total detention time of five point five hours at three point seven five that you are operating at the plant if you operated each individually you have got two point seven five hours. You have got several problems with the existing clarifiers sludge withdrawal, uneven withdrawal which means you have to do some valuing changes you got winter operation and collection with the ice is impossible. In fact the ice creates a problem in controlling flow out of the clarifiers because the clarifiers where set up with surface weirs. Need to prevent ice formation on the surface of the clarifiers so you can keep the weirs operating to get the flow out otherwise you are going to get flow concentrated on certain portions of the weir that were left open and it is going to pull the sludge up and take it out because you are going to get a very high flow rate in one point. In fact we looked at the weirs according to ten state standards you are limited to twenty thousand gallons a day per foot of weir that's operating right now at about twenty three thousand so the weir a little increase in weir length is needed there. In fact to cover that or to look at that the solution we looked at was you can increase that whole clarifier to about five mgd in fact you can look at, if you are only looking at ten point something mgd you can get away with two clarifiers with settling tubes in them. You can improve the clarification and improve the through put rate by looking at incline plates or settling tubes so that you do not have to build any new clarifiers if you are looking at just a ten mgd facility. Very critical such, but you do need to cover the facility. The settling tubes that we talked about you can't allow ice to build up on top and then the ice to fall they are very delicate tubes that ice would easily crush. But, you also need to cover to keep those weirs in operation and control out. The option to eliminate weirs you need to look at submerged orifices we built many plants which submerged orifices and the hydraulics here would be very difficult to modify to put submerged orifices in this facility. They would not lend itself would be a problem to do the two problems of the tube settlers and the wears the solution is to put covers over it. Covers do not mean heat, I have had the question will the water freeze, water is at thirty three degrees we will see freezing within side if you put a cover over it, no you will not. We have many facilities in New York State, City of Oneida, the Onondongua County Water Authority the Metropolitan Water Board, Colonie and other facilities where we have got filters and other units with no heat over the top of the water there is no ice in that unit. The only problem that I have had with freezing where I put out a room with no heat in it like this is on air lines that I have use a control where the airlines are very small and the compressor was out there and I have got freezing because I am changing pressures in lines and I have isolated problems and I have addressed those in the facilities but water freezing, walkways freezing the answer is no. Water is a very big heat sink yes, it is only a degree offfreezing but is moving through there and it is always that temperature. You get a little heat transfer from the rest of the buildings a little heat transfer from the movement of air as you open the door and other things so you are a little bit above that. But no freezing problems. So, yes an enclosure of it don't heat it in the summer you may well want to ventilate it, is the thing that you look at. You do not put any building up need ventilation but heating in the winter no need to. We have got many facilities and our experience has it that you do not need to heat within those buildings, but they do solve the problem with freezing. They solve the problem that you are able to maintain the facility as you are going through the winter and if you have a problem you can get out there and get on the unit. I guess, if you were only ten mgd and staying at ten mgd two clarifiers can provide you ten mgd. You do not need three or four. The question going back to the State, the State, the ten State standards that they use are bulletin forty two that look at facilities the only unit that needs a full capacity backup are the filters. The rapid mix the flocculator and the clarifiers you can get full rating on those. The reason being is if you loose a filter it is probably your primary device at the end of the facility. But if you have a problem with the clarifier and your sludge mechanism doesn't work you can drop a pump into it and start pumping it out to help you out until you get the mechanism fixed. In the flocculator or rapid mix the problems happen from dropping the mixer in the top. The mixer stops working you can get a mixer relatively quick and get it back into service and get you out. You cannot do that with a filter, when you have trouble with a filter and it goes down you are out of business. The filter is months before you can get it back into business or a month or better because you have a whole bed that you got to find out what the problems are. So, according to the State standards you could work with two clarifiers or three as we point out we were looking at the fifteen we talked three clarifiers. Clear well eight hundred and forty thousand gallons. According to the CT calculations that we did on that that is good for five mgd. Now CT is contact concentration times contact time. That is in the new State regulations there is a whole bunch of charts in there that you have got to follow we looked at we got for the three point seven five no problem it is only good up to five mgd right now. You have to have a new clarifier could be part of the new filters that you build. The problem that you have though is these are verticle turban pumps they are hanging down into a clear well with no sump. The clear well can only be dropped to approximately, you got to keep six feet of water depth out of a ten foot clear well. You have only got four foot of that clear well available to you. Need to do something here put a third pump in there you got that kind of problem again. In fact there is also Councilman Caimano- Y ou might also what to explain especially to the audience what a happens, there is a cavitation that happens that prevents it from going any further which causes us a power loss by the way Tom, you want to explain that. Mr. Geiss-The verticle turban pumps you are hanging a pump the pump is actually on top and the impeller is hanging on the pipe at the bottom. Ok, it cannot sit right on the bottom you have to let the water come in so its maybe the bottom of the pump is about a foot off the bottom ok, then the impeller is a little bit above that and you have to and what happens is, the pump operates you are forming vortexes or the water is starting to tum in the area. Each pump has what is called a required submergence steps so you do not have any problems. I do not need to look at what these pumps require submergence step is its six feet, when they go below six feet with two pumps there that are operating they have trouble, the start vortexing they start drawing air, they start having trouble can't go below. So, that is the problem. And easy solution is if you were to set up another clear well you set up a lower sump area ok, such that you drop the pumps where if this is the floor here put the pumps into a lower sump down here so you can use all that yet maintain pump submergence. This is something right out of the hydraulic standards that you look at. Need submergence on those impellers they do not work, it is just like if you throw a pump in a ditch it works great until it start sucking it needs to be submerged to take the water in. Need additional capacity, in as you go to anything larger than five mgd. You got probably double the capacity of the clear well or somewhere about that to get the CT time which is a State regulation again for what you need to do. The I guess the high lift pumping station we started talking about that is, I talked clear well I looked at it that you have two existing five mgd pumps great, they work at five mgd each they have a future capacity there of ten mgd, if you put in another pump. There is a tremendous heat build up problems in that pumping station right now with what you have got operating. There is also problems with water hammer out in the distribution system from the pump control valves. The pump control valves have been modified since their original installation to try and slow them down. Basically they operate too fast. Even with slowing down they still have some trouble. In fact they have some trouble the best solution is to open a hydrant up to try and relieve high pressures during the operation of those pumps to get them on and off. The original pump control that is used is a butterfly valve. A butterfly valve is also used on the low lift pumps it works great on the low lift pumps, because it is a low head application. That is where the butterfly pump control valve was really intended to be used. We have used it for the low head applications as you get into the higher heads you need to look at not only that but pump surges and you have got to be able to take care of them not with a hydrant that is expensive for operation and especially if you do not have somebody in the area to do it at the time you may well blow a line up. We looked at that in combination with the clear well so that we could use more of the clear well and actually maybe build less than an additional eight hundred and forty is to build a new high lift pumping station with a lower intake be able to use in fact on the clear well you have only got one, you cannot take it out of service you loose you whole plant. You cannot take it off to clean it. So, we looked at two solutions, there is a solution with two items here. Another clear well but off the end of the clear well build a lower sump and hang some new pumps in there. With that you are going to get increased capacity you have got two pumps here and the existing high lift use them ok, when you have got to get more water out of the plant that is also a storage tank. You got to cheat a little bit on your CT to make water out to your customers you can use that as a storage so you do not have to tum a new unit on. Ok, and yes they probably would be variable speed they could be variable speed they could, some of them could maybe not all. Back in the 70's variable speed the variable speed of to days ..was a thought and a new invention back then the couplings and other devices were available back then but today you have got the variable frequency drives you even have drives when you look at this of how to limit your inrush current so you do not cause the lights to dim. They are called soft starters which just come on the market recently. These are all things necessary looking at your operation cost too. But, again, can utilize more of your clear well though the operation of this facility. The existing as I said, to keep the existing pumps as backup and use them. But, you got, then you got the ability that there is some recognized or recognized crack in the bottom of the clear well, how much water here water losses happening through the crack in the clear well, can't take it out of service to look at it. Cost you more in operation problems then it would to fix the crack. Let the water be lost rather than worry about the rest of the system. But, again here you can as you grow you have got to look at another pumping station in our terms. The control valves and in fact we as, thorough our experience have looked at control valves that are made right here off the Hudson in Troy the Ross Valve. For high lift installations the Ross Valve is what a glob pattern is what it is called where the butterfly valve has a flapper that tums, and soon as it starts to open you are almost at eighty percent capacity or there abouts and that is the problem that is happening with the pump control that the operation is experienced. So, we looked at how can we increase the pump control problem how could we increase the submergence so we can utilize more of the clear well that is available to the operators we need more clear wells to grow on the plant but there is not surge control on the system. A new or different pump control valve would be the appropriate thing for a high lift. You are looking at a four hundred horse power pumps on the high lift, they are not small. They are as big as you can get on basically a four eighty system. You could go a little bigger but, we do not recommend that you do it. Chemical feed and instrumentation the existing system needs to be replaced. The existing system is good to six mgd when you go above six mgd the operators are guessing it the chemical feed rates. So, it is good to six mgd it is all that is good is the six mgd. We put some estimate in there for upgrade on the chemical feed and recognizing as you build a bigger plant you need more chemical storage you need the proper chemical feeders and the proper instrumentation. Instrumentation today what you have got there when you start to look at trying to back it up and replace it all the instruments down there right now you are making parts to rebuild them, you are not buying parts anymore. So, there is cost in the facility no matter what we do we have got to do it. The sludge handling I have got, you have got a lagoon a pond area and a drying bed right now and I guess right now the word is it is overloaded with what you have got. It cannot handle the flow it has got. We looked at that we have got experience in building drying beds freeze drying beds at lagoons and freeze dry beds natural freezing and we laid out a method of lagooning and freeze dry and the facility and with that such that you can get an operation it requires land however. But it is the most economical in a long run to doing mechanical dewatering. The I guess the project cost the flows are going to dictate what you are going to do. We in fact looking at the layout I could just look at that, as we looked at the facility and in fact when we looked at it we looked at it as yes, this is the first modification we also said what is the next Board going to look at when they go back to modified again in the twenty, twenty five years down the road. It also ties in to our projections of when we are asked to look at the regional facility. We started out and we plotted out I think there was an eleven mgd expansion here too we had colored this one in for a Board presentation so I used it. We modified one thing from the original design concept because when we looked at the plant we got the original clarifiers, rapid mix and flocculator here and you have got your original filters here. We looked at how could we expand the plant and the original idea was to put the clarifier just as we have shown it, they had over there, and put a filter on here. We had two conflicts with putting a filter out there as we looked at it from our experience of designing plants is if you put the next filter out here where do you go with the next filter and where do you go with the next filter and the clarifiers are starting to grow this way we have a little bit of a hydraulic problem of getting there and we looked at what was the maximum capacity of the facility. We also looked at as you start growing as a plant your chemical feed and storage area you need to look at what is available for that. You are tied in by the front row here, front road so this was the chemical feed area. Future chemical feed and it had to be recognized very logical growth point because the rest of your chemical feed occurred inside the building here in storage. So, you keep it within the same area. But, that and also water flows in here and down through the clarifier, right now it tums a corner comes down and the hydraulic drop and into the filters. If you were to grow using the same hydraulic path but build the filters right there and you can feed water, your keeping the existing facility in total use while you build a new facility. I guess that was one of our criteria also I did not mention earlier, how to keep the existing facility operating. We also then could start growing and if you start seeing here I will bring up the thirty mgd concept. All of a sudden growth happens in the same direction so hydraulically we are able to keep growing and in fact what you did to get to the ten or fifteen mgd we looked at the ultimate capacity of this facility is thirty mgd are you going to build thirty, no, but our attitude and when we look at plant expansions is todays expansion and is it the end expansion or is there another one available to you or to the next Board or to the next people. I would not do the next expansion I am too old but the next Board or the next people need, what else can you do? Who knows there may be a user coming in later on and you want to be able to do it. So, we looked at that as a logical growth pattern to get there an ultimate capacity. We did not limit it to fifteen we saw that someday you may want to grow greater it is going to be out in the future it also allowed us though which was very important that we could build facilities without interfering with the existing plant. Our experience said that you have got to expand this plant modifying the plant is difficult keeping a plant in operation while you are building is difficult you have got to look at how you can build the facility to constructability of the facility so that you can get it going without taking the plant out of service for an extreme length of time to achieve that. So, we came up with a concept like this. So, that's and we got lagoons over here and you are limited on total space over here so lagoons and drying beds were going around in the area here so, that's is what we looked at in doing the expansion. As I said we looked at going on into the future is what we did. I guess one of the things that I talked about is these are the facilities that we are talking about one point here is if we are talking ten mgd you can get ten mgd out of the existing clarifiers modifying with tube settlers. You do not have to build additional units operating flow trains to get it. With filters and I have worked with the State on rating filters for a long time you are not going to get away without building new filters. They have rated your filters at three point seven five mgd each you need to add the additional filters to get additional capacity. You cannot modify them to get additional capacity. There are low head filters they operate very well but the problem with low head filters is you do not have the high capacity. We looked at the options of building package plants to do a job here we looked at the option of building what we call a deep bed filter or a high rate filter, the hydraulics did not lend itself to put those facilities together with your operating facility that you had. The method of pulling it together and operating it was very difficult ok, so that the two did not match up. The increase in filter area or the decrease in filter area because a high rate filter that we have designed we designed filters from six to eight gallons a square foot you are three point seven five relates to a two point three gallons a minute a square foot. The high rate filter is six to eight and that is improved rate by the State Health Dept. but the six to eight requires twelve to fourteen foot a head available on top of the filter. Much deeper and either you put the head on top of the filter or you build the filter into the ground. If you build the filter into the ground then your clear well has got to be lower than that which means the existing clear well either the process has got to go up in the air which wouldn't match your process the clarifiers or the filter would have to go in the ground and the clear well would have to be deeper so they did not match with the existing. The existing is doing a very good job. So, then we compared the cost of trying to do the two together did not come out so we cost it what the alternative was. We looked at the package plant option the package plant option trident, the microflock trident system has another hydraulic problems that are not problems but they are different hydraulics so the hydraulic problems come in matching flows. Also varied packaged plant with a package process which is a totally different flow train, so now you can operate two treatment plants if you put in a package a building with a set of package plants in that is going to be one treatment plant and this is going to be another. You have got to have chemical feeds because you have a different process flow train with a package plant over there, different heads involved because that process for clarification requires you to actually pump through the first unit six to nine feet of head loss in the first unit. Your clarifier here has very little head loss but that plant has head loss through the media and you need to pump through it. So, either that has got to be built into the ground again or you have got to do some control here but again it is a different process, different chemicals, different rates need to be applied to that unit so you are building two different process flow trains would increase your operation and maintenance on the facility. Difficult cost wise it would cause operators to be more aware of two process flow trains and what each one needs to be adjusted at. Also we looked at what was the existing and how was the existing operating, operating very well, giving out very good water. We looked at some rough costing and it came out very advantageous to use the low head filters with the clear well underneath. So, this is how we got to utilizing and also you maintain the same process operation as you start growing you have got the same process so the chemicals back to that rapid mix you add chemicals at one point split the flow and it goes through the process. If you take one filter out the next filter takes it place because hydraulically it rates the same and it can take its place. You do not have to worry about one being up here and one down here and do they match up? So, we looked at other options and costed out the difference this became the lowest cost of the facility. I guess in looking at cost the absolute cost here depending on what the final flow rate is and the units, we have got unit costs in our facilities but we recognize and I pointed out modification and flow increase when you are doing this you need to recognize contingency and engineering cost at the bottom line. When we build facilities new construction if we were to go out into the field and build a new water plant when we take bids we recommend five percent contingency available during construction. When you take the bottom line dollar that is bid we said owner be aware there maybe mods to the tune of five percent on a new facility. Our experience one to two percent but we said keep that available there may be something that comes available maybe a soft starter that helps. We just finished a thirty two million gallon a day plant in the City of Utica and they had to spend twenty thousand dollars on a soft start. Niagara Mohawk did not build the facilities that they told them they were going to build so we had a hundred and thirty horse power motors that were dimming the lights to the tune of a twelve percent voltage drop. City had to spend twenty thousand dollars to correct that voltage drop problem because Niagara Mohawk took their little blue book out and said not our fault that we did not build them you have got to correct everything we are only supposed to supply you power and if you cause us any trouble you build it. It was cheaper to spend twenty thousand dollars then hire an engineer and an attorney to fight it for two years and still have a voltage problem that was going to cause operation problems. They had to spend extra money. That is the kind of thing I am talking about have money available in the budget five percent. When you go into a study at this point we looked at a twenty percent contingency on the project how close can we estimate? A modification project keeping the project in operation those have been associated with construction those or constraints over and above just building a new facility. We looked at twenty percent being available on the project, the engineering we have modified a lot of treatment plants some that we have built some that other people have built. We have put engineering, legal and miscellaneous here at twenty five percent on the bottom line. Well the multiplier then becomes forty five percent not thirty five as was referenced earlier. This is because of our experience, our worst fear is being low bidder on the project as engineers. We get called the worst kind of names when we are low bidder and when we are in the study phase we put those multipliers on our costs and when you go to construction the five percent made for new construction we may say you want to be seven, eight percent available for changes when you go to construction, when you finally go to construction maybe even ten percent available for changes. Maybe that foundation when we got there cracked that we were going to build the building around and we looked at the two corners which we looked at the stress points we did not look along the side and it cracked, we got to rebuild it. This happens when you modify or rebuild facilities. Somethings are not visible, how much work do we have to do on the crack in the clear well we do not know? But, when we drain it toward the end of the project we may recommend that some work be done to correct it. It may be one hundred dollars it may be a thousand it may cost ten it is well worth doing but you need contingency money to take care of that. So, that is where our multipliers are on the job. The final cost I believe that a well engineered facility be it by either another engineer or ourselves your final cost on the facilities to meet your flow requirements is going to be about the same. But you need to look at not building a lot, I think the concern here that I read the Board to say is how many more facilities, how much facility do you have to build? Well if we are ten mgd we said modify the clarifiers do not build new ones, because you have got buildings you got to build already modify them so you can do it. Settling tubes are not a new technology they are a proven technology. I guess I will open it up for questions? Mr. Ostrander-..Oll the tube settlers do you have documentation from other plants how they were operating before the tubes were put in and how they are operating now after and...better clarification with respect to turbidity or color? Mr. Geiss-Yes, we do and its a the documentation comes in, in the affect that you get not only it maintains the treatment, the unit treatment efficiency is maintained with the flow increasing through the unit. Because the settling tube concept ok, and what they called it isn't just putting a lot of tubes vertically in a flow. Is everybody familiar with the tube concept? Tubes, settling tubes, why put a settling tube in, could you bring the board up Rick? Setting tubes are incline tubes, ok, the rate at which particles settle ok, the ten State standards look at having about four hours of settling maybe some plants can ...as low as two and a half or there about. But the settling tube concept is a little different and it increases, it increases it allowable flow through the plant. You look at original facility you could have a tube that looks about that big and there are particles all over in that tube and you have got to look at them and this could be a tank as big, I will take one unit, out of a tank. This depth is twenty feet or something like that, but you are looking at these particles settling down to here, so you can collect them. Concentrating so you can collect them. You got this depth that they have got to start falling especially this upper critical depth here that's four to five feet so that you can get the water out, the clear water out the weirs below. Once it starts getting heavier it falls naturally. The settling tube concept is put these on about sixty degrees ok, now, you still have got the same particles ok, if you take the verticle line, the total verticle line is less. It is very simple criteria and then the concentration starts occurring right here and that concentrated flow goes down and falls the total depth in the unit. So, you have got a clear water flow that is occurring up here and the dirty coming down here but the settling tube increases the efficiency in the unit by giving it at shallower area to really settle out of. Then the heavy solids fall very nicely down to the bottom and are collected. The change in the units from what you have got is you have got a bridge that goes and does collection right now, if these, if you look at your tank the settling tubes sit right in here, I am a very poor drawer, ok, right in the middle, you cannot run a bridge across the top of those or though those because the bridge hangs from the top. So, now, you have got to put a collection mechanism down here underneath that travels the length of the unit, and basically it is like a vacuum cleaner that travels on a track. Or you can have that is the todays version of it or you can have a unit that just has a bunch of paddles that keeps cycling and pulling everything over to this end, that is the other way of doing it. But, this is how you increase the capacity of an existing unit for clarification. This is the method as Bruce you asked the question how does it increase? You maintain the, you do not you are getting very good turbidity and other things coming out of the clarifier what you are going to do is you are going to increase the flow and maintain your quality going on top of your filters and that is critical. So, it's I am not going to, I may increase the quality in lower flows at higher flows I am going to be able to give you the same quality. Unknown-Even in cold water? Mr. Geiss-Cold water yes. You have got to maintain the flock though, this is where your alkalinity adjustment and getting your flock up is very critical. The advantages as shown by these charts here that in cold water you have got less flow ok, so you are not pushing the plant to its peak. When you hit the peak on the plant very difficult to operate the plant because now you are tweaking the plant to do very good. But in your case cold water operation as your low flow operation, lower flow operations this will increase your settling as you have it right now. It will also allow you to collect the sludge in the winter. You need, again I talked about earlier, if you allow ice to build up, up here for some reason any broke away it would crush those tubes, so you cannot have the ice build up on the top. But you have also got those weirs that come out here that you have already got ice build up problems with and you need to keep those weirs clear. Right now you have got to chop ice out of them some winter days to keep the weirs clear. Because what you get is if you get as I started to mention you get a just one spot here that is clear ok, where normally I would have a velocity vector of about that size well only one spot is clear that velocity vector gets a lot longer. If that gets longer you have got sludge down here, or particles down here it pulls them up and that deteriotes your water quality leaving the clarifiers which goes on top of your filters and then you have got operate the filters differently to maintain water your finished water quality. That is the problem with ice build up on wears. Mr. Mark Kestner-I think I would like to say a few things if it is all right about the design aspect of it. First of all the twenty year projection as far as bonding goes bond council right now if you could continue to add years to a bond the interest rate would go up so we think that selecting the twenty year time frame was reasonable. We did look at multiple years of data and we put our recommendations together before the water use restrictions go we were talking about controlling lawn sprinkling or say seven to nine for a couple of times a day we are not getting into going in peoples homes and redoing their bathrooms and some of the other things that were suggested there. As regard to the meeting with the understanding the State Health Dept. we had them Jack Dunn over to our office within the last month and we talked to him about the project. Regarding the cavitation you can do baffling if you have to down in the clear well if you want to go down in the clear well you can do down in the clear well you have to pick the time when you are going to do that and you float off from your storage. I think it is a credit to the plant that they have not had to go down there for seventeen years. As far as the settling tanks go we do not intend to put a building over them we spoke to manufacturers and we have a means of scraping the bottom of the tank underneath the ice blanket. What we are trying to avoid here is the expense of the building. I would say for a plant that has consistently put out quality water for seventeen years you know, we think it is a excellent example of design when the as it was pointed out here the main element is your filter and what are we doing seventeen years later we are coming back and using the same filter. I think it is a credit to the decisions that our firm made back seventeen years ago. Thank you. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Can I ask a question about the leak in the clear well what is the basis of that? Mr. Geiss-I think Ralph could answer that. Mr. Ralph VanDusen-We in 1989 we hired an engineer to come in to go in the tank the clear well to evaluate it Mr. Quentin Kestner-A diver? Mr. VanDusen-Diver, to make sure that the ..to make sure things were in line when he went down there he found the basic structure was integrity of the basic structure was excellent a few minor things, but minor. He found one spot a small leak in the bottom of the clear well at the end of the baffle wall and his recommendation that it was a relatively minor thing it was not something that we needed to worry about shutting the plant down and instantly fixing, we at that time discussed a proposed plant expansion and modification that might take place and it was his recommendation that the leak was small enough that it would certainly wait until that point where it should be addressed. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Was that the one that you talked about over the phone he defined as a non leaking leak? Mr. VanDusen-He showed a picture of the accumulated sludge in the bottom of the clear well, and you can very clearly see a flat blanket and a dip down an indication of a relatively minor leak and in his written report he referred to it as a non leak and I do not quite understand that but in discussion with him about that he said that the only way that the sludge would have that hollow dip depression is that there is something happening to cause that to go down there whether it is making the ground or what... Mr. Quentin Kestner-In otherwords that is really not a confirmed leak at this time. Mr. VanDusen-At this point, right, you are right I guess the only way we can confirm it is to probably drain the clear well down and look at it. Mr. Quentin Kestner-That is about two and a half three feet thick there I would be very surprised if that is leaking frankly. We have some joints between buildings and I do not know if there, what might be going on there. I would be very surprised... Mr. Geiss-Can you offer an explanation of the dip in the sludge blanket? Mr. Quentin Kestner-I can't Mr. Geiss-lam not concerned of whether it is a leak or not, I think it is a minor leak if it is, the comment on the sludge blanket though how do we clean the sludge blanket I think is a concern and having two clear wells is a concern that we looked at. Also, a combination, the pumps the submergence on the pumps yes, you can put some vortex eliminating walls between the pumps to get them to operate and you will get some more depth. You are never going to be able to use the whole depth of the clear well there is not sump in the clear well for the pumps to hang into and we look at that as being able to use that clear well because, when you calculate the usable clear well with the CT you have baffling factors and usable depth that have to be worked with. The CT number, if I was using all that depth I probably, I would throw the CT number out because I want to use that depth to help me operate my plant so that I could take a peak off the treatment plant. In fact, if it comes to be the way the plant was operated back in the 70's when you tum the pump on you operate a plant a three mgd or five mgd then once the tanks are full you turn the plant off or down you did not do much throttling back then instead today when you are right up at the edge you throttle you turn on everything you can and get your plant at the maximum and get the water out ok, that was something that I did not say when we looked at you know vs that operation with todays. But you need to be able to use more of that clear well. Using only four foot available at the top of the clear well and then you end up with trouble. Back when walls you do not know what they are going to do for you. The hydraulic standards say they may do something, I have had bad experiences using the hydraulic standards as the absolute on doing it, hydraulic standards were developed solely by pump manufacturers to sell pump is where I have experienced it. I have experienced it in two different ways. I have been able to put close to fifty percent more flow then the standards said I could in wet wells, verticle wells. And then I have had problems in others where I could not meet based on the standards too. So, where do they come in you have got to do a lot of hydraulic work and there is a lot of, they have come up with a lot of good engineering principals there and if you follow them all we are not in trouble. That is where I look at using them to do it. But, they the baffle walls they have...in the vicinity of the wells to prevent vortexing but you do have it here. I have always, O'Brien and Gere has always put in a larger sump area so that we do get the submergence on the pumps as we are operating so we can keep operation of the pumps. Again if we have got trouble with two pumps and it is a small area the pumps are in if you pump the third pump in that same small area you have got even more trouble. That's what you have to look at here is do you put a third pump in there. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Just as a response to that, first of all we do not agree that the Parco surge control valve is a poor choice and I think us and Parco can site hundreds of installations where we have used them, we have used them on high lift installations. I would note for the record that when I called Parco and Ralph indicated when I went on a plant tour on Wednesday that they had been unsatisfied with the Parco valves I asked that Parco rep when was the last time that there was a service call from Parco on that equipment and he said 1980. So, I do not know that, that valve was operating as it was designed to operate when the last time the manufacturer looked at it was twelve years ago. I know from our experience that we have used that type of valve on a high head installation very successfully, so does that thing require some tune up does that thing require some adjustment I do not know I have not really had the time to look into it but I do not agree that it is just a poor choice for a high lift installation and you are going to have a number of certainly the manufacturer is going to agree with that. Now, engineers disagree a lot of times on what valves to pick for various things I guess we are just not going to agree on that. The other thing is I believe to put in the high lift station is a million dollars if I look at their estimate and I have not heard anything yet in my mind that where we have got a million dollars worth of problems. So, I would like to have the board consider the utilization of the existing station I think we can make it work I think we need anti vortexing baffles I am very skeptical about this clear well leak, I think it merits a little more you know determination. A couple of other points lets say, I do not agree with the rating on the existing clarifiers because I met with Jack Dunn last week in my office and he made it very clear to me that if we built on filter section that our plant would be rated at five mgd. So, I guess we are not in agreement on the rating of the existing clarifiers. It is my understanding that the restriction of three point seven five is solely a case of the absence of a redundant filter and that's the apparent position of the Health Dept. I guess I am a little bit skeptical that if you cover those tanks that you are not going to have them freezing I respect the gentlemen experience we have got experience too and I guess I have not always been so fortunate. I think that in waste water when we cover tanks and things like that we have a higher heat and we have not had any problems in water I am a little less certain of that. The icing problem with the clarifier is legitimate we think that fact that it could be solved in part by putting in a limited length of scraper to handle that winter problem but I am not opposed to the concept of replacing the whole scraping mechanism, we recognize that as a problem. In looking at something like the orifice tubes I guess that works fine for ten or fifteen years now they seem to be plugging I am not sure what is going on there, but the tube was put in, in accordance with the manufacture recommendation, if it is a serious problem I do not know if you could just slide it around or if you could put in some other type of flow metering device that would resolve the problem. I do not agree with the selection of their location for the chemical room in fact at this time for a ten mgd solution I do not believe we need to build a chemical room and I think the filters are where they should be. We have an indication from the Health Dept. that if we put in those two additional filters that and run a successful high rate study that we can get them up rated to fifteen mgd. So, those are some of the things that we considered in our design. We certainly agree with his concern about zebra muscles and my report mentions that we agree with his concern about the sludge drain and we put in the same amount of money that they did for freeze beds and lagoons so I guess we do not differ much on that. Administration building wise, I guess they recommended and went ahead with the proposed eight hundred and fifty million gallon dollar addition to the administration facilities. Supervisor Brandt-Eight hundred and fifty thousand. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Eight hundred and fifty thousand, yea, I guess that was one of the last things I would have done if we got a sense of priorities here on what should have been done first and if I had gone through with the operator and had a few problems that were indicated I think I would have put my money into facilities that produced water and solved any number of existing problems long before I would have put in a administration building. Mr. Mark Kestner-If in fact these problems are as significant you know as portrayed here it seems to us that if you are going to spend that kind of money it was necessary to relocate the existing septic system and relocate some electrical cables so I would just say in actually constructing not building you know the location necessitated movement of existing facilities that were working quite well. So, we would have put the money into production and I think that is what we recommended ... Supervisor Brandt-I would like to get through some other questions for myself. In the O'Brien and Gere study you did a cash flow projection and in one of those cash flows you did it with the water treatment plant expansion and it is table eleven, what I want to know is in the debt service calculations how much debt was assumed to be serviced there? In otherwords you had proposed bonds and... Councilman Caimano- Table eleven where? Mr. Geiss-I am sorry where? Supervisor Brandt-It says table eleven.. Mr. Geiss-What report... Supervisor Brandt-Water rate study, how much bonding was done here? How many dollars were borrowed? Mr. Geiss-Do you know that Rick? Mr. Rick Gell The water plant and the first phase of the distribution system improvement. Approximately twelve point five million. Supervisor Brandt-Ok, in your study on page fifty six you show, fifty five and fifty six you show the cost of expansion of the plant and on fifty five and fifty six you show some costs for a distribution system. There are two alternatives shown on fifteen million gallon plant one for seven point eight million dollars costs and one for ten point five million dollar cost what is the difference, what were those two alternates. Mr. Geiss-Those were transmission improvements that you are referencing, water treatment plant improvements. Supervisor Brandt-I understand. Mr. Geiss-I think if you go to the cost charts in the back tables in the report now, the tables Councilman Caimano- Which report? Mr. Geiss-In the water treatment report, the big report we have, if you start with table eight and proceed you will find the dollars that are referenced from the table on page fifty six that you are referencing. Councilman Monahan-Which section are you in? Councilman Goetz-Under tables. Mr. Geiss-Under tables after the first blue section divider is labeled tables. Mr. Rick Gell-One of the fifteen mgd alternatives includes Lake George. Councilman Caimano-It strikes me though that all of this now based on what we have heard here today is non sequitur it really is what it is. Because it seems as if we have zero in on a number that number seems to be ten if I may make a guess. Mr. Geiss-In that range. Councilman Caimano- In that range so all of these, we really have to go back and do these again because all of this information that was put together in order to make a bid was done so with other Mr. Quentin Kestner-But I would point out that in 1988, '87 and '89 that we recommended the five mgd addition to ten we have not changed... Councilman Caimano- I am not denying that. Mr. Quentin Kestner-It seems like if I hear the gentlemen correctly we are now down to addition to the plant to bring it up to five I assume then we are no longer recommending that the Town spend twelve million dollars on plant Councilman Caimano- That I do not know. Mr. Quentin Kestner-and eight or ten million dollars on transmission Councilman Caimano- That I do not know. Supervisor Brandt-That is why I am asking about the debt service, if we build a fifteen million plant and it requires either seven or ten million dollars for, to distribute the water that it makes why wouldn't the debt service, why wouldn't we add that into the debt service otherwise why would be build the plant? Mr. Geiss-In discussing the transmission and distribution system improvements which we, I did not cover it all here, as you increase flow through the system we recognize that you need additional transmission and distribution or transmission and storage improvements to be able to get flow thorough the system. In fact I think we recognized that there are some immediate improvements that we recommended right off the bat that regardless of doing anything we said we should we have got a couple bottlenecks in the system. The transmission improvements and storage improvements would reflect on when you needed them they are not an immediate need for construction is the way we looked at it. I think it's Supervisor Brandt-The question comes to me I guess put it in a different way is that suppose what does Queensbury need vs what do we have to provide if Moreau comes in or somebody else comes in, in otherwords, Town of Moreau you do not know this but they called me Friday or Thursday I think and they said well, we need eight hundred thousand gallons a day and we may need a million then my question is, and they said if the price is right they need that if the price isn't right they do not need it. So, really isn't the price, I do not as a Queensbury taxpayer pay for a pipe to bring them water so they have got to pay for it and what will our system distribute? In Queensbury how much water can our system distribute with minor changes? Mr. Geiss-Somewhere ten to fifteen mgd. Some where in the ten mgd range. Supervisor Brandt -So we have got a distribution system that we need for everything we can foresee at this point. Mr. Geiss-Yes Supervisor Brandt-So, if the Town of Moreau wants water they are going to have to put in their line and that is going to have to be added to their price. Mr. Geiss-That is right. Supervisor Brandt-And that means from the plant on or where ever, if Mr. Geiss-I think, you can look at the way we looked at the prices I believe I do not know if the charts are in the book that way, I think when we talked to the communities there has been several charts prepared that look it when you go to do transmission improvements I think we used the number nine mgd as the number that the town recognized as their current capacity when they were looking at transmission costs and how to charge outside users as they come in. Now, an outside user could be a new user, lets say new user as they come in it could be another district or it could be another totally another community. We said that the current users within Queensbury get credit for nine million gallons a day of capacity and that number floated around a little bit but it was decided that, that was a reasonable number to assume that the existing transmission and storage system was good to provide to the current users. So, when you looked at what you needed to do when you go beyond that you got credit for nine million gallons of capacity before you paid any more. The new user is then were to pay for the increase in facilities necessary to serve them. Supervisor Brandt -Ok the point gets down to this as in the City of Glens Falls they originally wanted a lot of water and then when you get into the distribution cost the cost of bring that line from our plant to their service it is prohibitive and so they cannot afford it and I wonder if the same thing is happening with Moreau and if Moreau is then if that is the case and it is cheaper for them to treat their own water near by and not get into all those costs then again that pulls down the gallonage figures a little bit. Mr. Geiss-Moreau did a basic contact and I think the answer to them was and I forget the connection point Ralph but we never promised them water across the river they were always assumed to make a connection either right at the treatment plant or right at one of the main transmission lines and I cannot think of the connection point, I do not know if Bill or Ralph Mr. VanDusen-The connection point they talked about was at the intersection of the twelve inch line at the intersection of Luzerne Road and Richardson Street and Moreau was looking at paying distribution costs to hook it up from that point on. Supervisor Brandt-If they were in there for a million gallons a day eventually will that necessitate force us to expand our system to serve our own people? Mr. VanDusen-Rist Frost did the study on that and Unknown-I do not know if it was a halfmgd or one mgd we were looking at. Mr. Geiss-I think it was in the range of eight hundred to a million gallons. Mr. VanDusen-What jumps into mind when we did the flow study it was eight hundred thousand at that point, eight hundred thousand gallons a day and at that point there were no improvements necessary for water distribution. Supervisor Brandt -Ok. So, that is something we can look at. Councilman Tucker-I guess I have a question as long as we are at this point I do not know whether it entered into your discussion or not, with Moreau. Moreau has got a law suit against GE for contaminating water over there did that have any bearing on whether they would be taking water from us? Supervisor Brandt -Yes. Councilman Tucker-It did? Mr. VanDusen-It was made very clear....direct bearing. Councilman Tucker-A direct bearing whether they would be taking water from us. Supervisor Brandt -Absolutely. Mr. VanDusen-And just for the Board's information during your discussion they ran hot and cold depending on... Councilman Caimano-How the law suit would go. Supervisor Brandt-My point is this in each guys analysis your saying that average daily consumption in the year 2010 or 2015 and there is a question which one you were looking at is somewhere between an average daily, somewhere if Moreau is in it is five point seven million gallons a day, if they are not, if they are in it is six point three if they are out it is five point seven or something like that by your figures. Maximum or peak day is either thirteen point or eight or twelve point five and it just seems to me that what we are really saying though is if we double our plant today we could meet that without water restrictions. If we got in trouble then by simply restricting lawn sprinkling we have had a hell of a good margin of safety yet. It gets down to a basic decision also are we going to be building a plant configuring it so that someday we can do thirty million gallons a day when Queensbury will probably will never need, I cannot imagine a situation where they need seven or eight maybe. You know, with an enormous build out they, that is probably all they will ever need in their history. Unknown-The population that you asked about earlier Mike, the population figures that these flow projections are based on look at in 1990 based on the 1990 census of around sixteen thousand to seventeen thousand people served in the present district. We projected those out including a very modest expansion of the district geographically very very small so that the Hiland and Glen Lake developments were listed more as examples of the kind of thing that may occur over the next twenty five years rather than a certainty today. So, we have actually only projected like a fifty percent population increase over a twenty five year period including the geographic expansion that is only 2% per year on the average and you look at it on that basis it is a rather modest annual increase. But that still gets us even at the higher flow rate per capita we are still at the ten mgd range for Queensbury's own needs. I do not know if that helps you to go back to your original question. Councilman Monahan-Tony when you did your transmission layout and study and estimation did you include in those prices going through the Glen Lake area and looping the system? Mr. Geiss-I believe so. Councilman Monahan-I think you did as far as I recollect. Mr. Geiss-I did not go back and review that in detail for today I have got to be honest with you because I wasn't I did not concentrate on that because we were talking projections and treatment plants so I did not look at the transmission recommendations. Councilman Monahan-I am only asking that to make sure we are comparing apples and apples and not an apple and a pear and that is why I asked the question. Councilman Tucker-That part was included in the transmission Councilman Monahan-In O'Brien and Gere I am not sure if it was in Kestner. Councilman Tucker-But what we were talking right here today you have not got to change the transmission. Councilman Monahan-If you look the system and include the Glen Lake area which is very concerned about their water quality and the pressure is on there for water you will have to figure that Pliney because the ... Councilman Tucker-It is not economically feasibly to do it. Councilman Monahan-The system is not looped right now. Mr. Mark Kestner-If! could offer one other thing now, we are talking about credits for existing capacity and transmission mains we are the engineers for a system that serves four or five, serves four towns over thirty thousand people what that town did was that they include the assessed valuations of the adjoining towns in the contract so that fifteen years from now when the State of New York comes down and says my trihelomethane standards is this you can continue to assess them with the upgrades in your plant that the State regulations are going to require you to do. You do not want to be caught short here in otherwords selling them capacity and saying ok, you can get eight hundred thousand gallons of water because fifteen years from now and the State tells you oh by the way do this you want to be able to go back and get them for the required expansion. Supervisor Brandt-Let me ask you something, there was an implication made that in the discussion between the two engineers that I do not, I want to be put on the table so I can compare apples to apples and it is a term that I am not used to so hang on its contact time CT, the implication is that we might have a contact time problem because of our wet well what do you call it, the level it is called the wet well is that right. Mr. Geiss-Wet well or Clear well. The volume in the clear well at this point is good for I believe up to five million gallons a day the existing clear well with the contact time which is a combination of the chlorine residual times the time that you have contact within the clear well itself times what they call a baffling factor which means that there is recognized some water short circuits through a well it does not go in as a total particle in particle out. Supervisor Brandt-Let me ask you guys have you looked at that? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yes The contact time required varies with the PH, temperature of the water and discussing this with the Health Dept. they are going to look at the size of the clear well and the baffling those are the criteria in terms of the clear well capacity. Supervisor Brandt -So, what you are saying you could baffle Mr. Quentin Kestner-We are already baffled. I do not have a problem with the additional clear well capacity being isolated from what is there now. Mr. Mark Kestner-We are adding clear well capacity Mike. Mr. Quentin Kestner-We are adding clear well capacity. Mr. Mark Kestner-Under the filters Mr. Quentin Kestner-And you will meet the CT requirement Mr. Mark Kestner-And we can tailor make that to meet the CT requirements there is no problem and that is m Mr. Quentin Kestner-And we do not have any problem in separating so you can isolate... Supervisor Brandt-That is a question that they had never addressed and I wanted to hear their... Unknown-We did intend to add clear well capacity with the upgrade and that is in the... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I have not seen this report where this diver indicates there is some materials down in the clear well and I do not doubt that there is a little bit of probably light fluffy depression in a few locations but, the other day I went thorough I clicked both hatches up and it looked clear as a bell to me at least the one in the electrical room did. I do not know how extensive maintenance is required in a clear well but I do not think it is a big thing. I would recommend to the Board not to be overly concerned about that. Mr. VanDusen-1 would like to make the comment that it was clear as a bell when you were there roughly a foot and a half.... Supervisor Brandt -So what you are saying is maybe a foot, foot and a half of in some kind of a Mr. VanDusen-In some areas there is absolutely none Mr. Quentin Kestner-When you open up the hatch in the electric room you can see all the way down to the floor. Mr. VanDusen-Yes and it is white it looks just like concrete. Supervisor Brandt-But, let me ask you something in handling a pool you take a vacuum cleaner and you vacuum out the bottom of the stuff of the bottom can't that be done on the clear well. Mr. VanDusen-You can we talked about that it's keep in mind it is people's drinking water you have some restrictions there it is relatively light and fluffy you can vacuum it and it will fluff up and then settle and that sort of thing you are working through ten or eleven feet of water..you are somewhat restricted in your ability ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I do not have a problem we are going to add clear well capacity isolated from the rest of the clear well and if it needs to be cleaned it can be cleaned. I guess I do not see it as a serious problem. Councilman Tucker-It never has been in seventeen years. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Right. Supervisor Brandt -Ok, anybody got any other questions? From the audience go ahead. ... Mr. Brian LaFlure-Just a comment Mike, I am here today representing the Fire Service a few people made some comments about the fire service and the water flow we have taken some time at a recent meeting and gone over this and we did go over and meet with some guys at the water treatment plant and talked about what is here and isn't here. I am not an engineer and I am not here to tell you how to build a plant I would like to make a couple comments to the Board as you are considering what you are going to do here. The fire service is in agreement that obviously the plant needs to be upgraded and I think everyone agrees with that. Our biggest concern and some of the conversations involved the clear water wells and the other things is redundancy and the capability of dealing with a major failure at this plant. I will only recount to you something that happened in 1989 when one of the highest flows occurred. Tom Flaherty the Water Superintendent called me at Two O'Clock in the morning to tell me that he was concerned that we did not have enough water to fight fire in our district. That raises a couple of questions it is easy to say you can put restrictions on lawn sprinkling and you can do stuff like that, policing it is another item. My concern is a large portion of the commercial area in our district was just received a new rating a higher rating because of fire fighting and water supply. A lot of those buildings required sprinkler systems and the water supply has to be on the sprinkler system. If you bring the pressure down low enough on the distribution system because the tanks have gone down or because you have a problem in the water treatment plant the sprinkler system will not function. These buildings are receiving credits on their insurance and they are using the sprinkler system as their detection. If you do not have a sprinkler system and the heads do not melt and the water doesn't come out then no alarm indication is given and people are using this as part of their protection. So, I think it is important that we keep in mind the redundancy you know, up grading an existing pump or adding an additional pump or the chance of putting in two instead of one I realize it is a lot of dollars involved here and I pay taxes right in the center of this town just like everybody else. I think it is important for our standpoint that whether you go ten, fifteen or whatever size plant you build that we concentrate a lot of energy on the redundancy of if we have to shut down something, there is something out there to take up the, to take it up. You can not count on the tanks because the tanks will go dry. It does not take long on a seven or eight million gallon day and this has happened in the past it does not take long to bring those tanks down. I have lived that situation, the fire service in the center of town that is in the water district has built their equipment and purchased their equipment under the assumption that we have water coming out of the hydrants. Yes we have a tanker plan and we have some other things we also have some very large commercial buildings and those are all working under the assumption that the sprinkler systems are going to work. I would just pass that along to the board, that is our thought. Supervisor Brandt-Are you guys telling us though, I mean in fact that one of these systems is from your view point is what you think you need? Is there something wrong with either of what we are considering. Mr. LaFlure-No, not at all Mike, I have listened to the whole discussion this morning and I would like to ask Mr. Kestner about whether or not the clear well was going to be, whether it was going to be two or just one. When you tell me there is only one clear well and that is where all the high lift pumping is done if something happens to that some kind of catastrophic failure with that unit in and Ralph suddenly decides that something gets fixed up something falls in there and they cannot pump the water out of that bed water has got to come from somewhere and if that pit is going to be down for a length of time and the tanks go dry now you are telling me it doesn't matter what restrictions you have there isn't any water. So, my only comment to you is as you are going through this to make sure that you have, you have some redundancy you have the capability of backing up every piece of this plant so that when you run a plant at maximum capacity if you lose half of the equipment that is there one pump goes down something fails that is a concern. The generator was put in recently and those kinds of things we looked at, we supported that generator project strongly and that is very important, these things need to be looked at. From our perspective I am not trying to tell you how to build a plant or what size it should be just that something, just that something needs to be there when it is needed and the plant now is running now at a situation where there are times when if they lose a particular part of that plant that they are going to go way below what is needed. That is a problem with redundancy. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Mike can I speak to that? Supervisor Brandt -Yes Mr. Quentin Kestner-In 1989 one of the first things we started to do when we began to actually design the five mgd expansion and we still had the drawings and specifications, we wanted to add one low lift pump and add one high lift pump that is how we would have spent the first few hundred and fifty thousand dollars we would have given you a greater pumping reliability. We added a two mgd tank a two million gallon tank to this water system and if you are looking for storage at three mgd, of three million gallons if we do this plant expansion we calculate it and it is really just based on the availability of the elevated storage that if a fire occurred during the period when water use was equal to the future plant output of ten mgd the flow available for fire protection would be ten thousand gallons per minute for five hours. That is forty hose streams the hose stream being two hundred and fifty gallons a minute. In a very sever fire we define as one which requires five thousand gallons a minute, twenty fire hose steams.., I want you to feel comfortable with what you have but I also want to you know that the first thing we wanted to do to this plant was to add intake and high lift capacity back in 1989. They did not do it. So, I am with you when it comes to fire protection we do not have any problem at all. Long before I would have built the administration facility I would have given this plant additional low lift and additional high lift maybe even additional storage capability. That is the same kind of thinking that we will put into the addition. Mr. LaFlure- The only thing that concerns me you look at any plant and facility if you look at the plant where in this plant is there something that there is only one of? Ok, ..from the discussion I have heard today the only place I really see that as a serious problem is the clear water tank. If there was a failure in that tank where are you going to... Unknown-Well they do have what is called competent reliability guidelines for different things and they do look at the different components like, electrical panels and duel this and duel that ok, but there are systems to took at what we call competent reliability and in fact what happens if, this goes out. That is part of the design and we do incorporate that into ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-I want to assure you because I was involved in the design as well as the construction of that clear well that is not going any place. That is a well built structurally sound and I think according to your report indicates, I do not want you to worry about the condition of that clear well. Mr. LaFlure-Just what I am saying with a clear well like that, what Ralph just said its drinking water he has some very strict requirements he has to deal with if some fool falls in down there or open, the hatch is open and he dumps a can of paint into or something happens that contaminates that tank what else have we got. We got the tank that are on the, we have our storage tank and once the storage tanks are dry on a seven million gallon a day.. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Yea, what you are concerned about is exactly the same thing I am concerned about and that is when I get into lawn sprinkling inother words when you have got unlimited lawn sprinkling going on you have got a higher use on your system then a major severe fire. Mr. LaFlure-Oh I agree. Mr. Quentin Kestner-I think that is a poor use of the water. That is why I feel intelligence demands that you take a look at that as a very viable option, because when you allow unlimited lawn sprinkling then you take away from your capability to fight a fire in the summer, and I ask you which is more important. I think it is more important that they keep those storage tanks up and they reserve that capacity for fire fighting and drinking water, ok, and you and I are thinking the same on that. That if there is a choice and I think they should have perhaps done it years ago, but, I recommended this in some of my earlier reports that they consider that because if it is a choice between sprinkling my lawn and providing adequate fire protection I am with you guys, adequate fire protection. The first money I would have spent would have been in additional pumps not four hundred square foot offices for people, so I think you and I are... Councilman Caimano- I think we have gotten off the beaten track here because I do not know if anybody has said it is either lawn sprinkling or fire fighting so lets get off from that. ... Mr. Quentin Kestner-It is a viable choice. Councilman Monahan- I do not know if it is either, I agree with Nick because if you think everything is normal and people are sprinkling their lawns because we think it is ok and then something happens over at that plant goes down and in the mean time have a big fire you cannot get the word out to people that quick, quit sprinkling your lawn. I do not think it is a viable answer either? Mr. Thomas Philo-Can I speak now? Councilman Monahan-Sure. Mr. Philo-Thank you. Mr. Brandt and all of the Town Board we have a committee of older people, concerned citizens that are looking into this and we went through this plant and we are happy to see whatever needs to be done to this plant if it is valid. What we did look at Betty was that eight hundred and some thousand they put in for that office building. We run ajob down in Albany forty two million they had an office twelve by twelve...they showed us this office, that office we, bigger than all of our it held the equipment and everything for a big construction outfit. They had wanes coating you talk about impressive it was twenty eight dollars a lineal foot for chair rail, where did you people on the board Betty spend the money what did they do this? This Mr. Kestner came up with a very good idea just look at where we are spending our money before we spend it for things that are not needed. Do we need two offices for the assistant and for the Councilman Monahan-Tom as far as I am concerned Mr. Philo-Excuse me let me finish Betty please. Councilman Monahan-All right, I think we are wasting time. Mr. Philo-I think the Town people were right, and you were on that Board Betty and I am looking straight at you in twelve hours am I right with the time before this was they gave permission to build this building, before this new administration took over, believe me I am not holding you responsible but it is not right. Another thing, this is not eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars from what we have checked it is more than that. We had the footings put in and the contract negotiated before they even ok'd it. We went over there and they did have the footings in am I right Mr. Brandt? Supervisor Brandt-I do not know that. Mr. Philo-Am I right, you had the footings in that building before it was even contracted? Mr. VanDusen-No Councilman Tucker-They moved the electrical, the electrical was moved the septic system was .. Mr. Philo-Were the forms put in did you put them in. Mr. VanDusen-We did not. Mr. Philo-Who put them in. Mr. VanDusen-Rosch Brothers Mr. Philo-Rosch Brothers they put them in before the contract was let. Mr. VanDusen-They certainly did not. The excavation was dug it was part of the responsibility of the Water Dept. to perform the rough excavation for the site work, to replace the septic system which was the leach field that failed and had to be moved because part of the system was where the building was and part of the system was also where future clarifiers were going to go. That was our responsibility to do. Mr. Philo-..to be and I look at them and I think we should look at things like this too. How much money have we wasted in that building you might better rent it out. Supervisor Brandt-Well ok, those are all things we have got to look at Councilman Caimano-I do not know what the relevancy to .. Councilman Monahan-I do not know what the relevance is to this or what we are talking about what we are going to do to the .. Supervisor Brandt-Well I will tell you by God, I will tell you the relevance. Twelve hours before this Board came on board you put the resolution in front of the past Board to make that decision to make danm sure we did not get a shot at it and if you want that on the record I put it on the record. Councilman Monahan-Mike Supervisor Brandt-And I think that's stinks, Betty. Counncilman Monahan-You Supervisor Brandt-And you made the motion or you seconded it so don't sit there and say like it is nothing it took eight hundred thousand dollars away from us right now if that money were in there we would have over two million dollars. I will point out something else Councilman Monahan-The point of it is... Supervisor Brandt-Now wait a minute, I am talking by God Councilman Monahan-We are here Supervisor Brandt-Betty, Councilman Monahan-We are here today, we are here today Supervisor Brandt-By God you can sit and try and talk over me all the time you Councilman Monahan-To discuss the expansion of the water treatment plant Supervisor Brandt -want to but I got the floor Councilman Monahan-going into ...has got no bearing on the expansion Supervisor Brandt -and I am running the meeting and I have got the right to have the floor Councilman Monahan-of the water plant. Supervisor Brandt -You want this on the floor, I am putting it on the floor. Councilman Monahan-Well, put it on the floor but Supervisor Brandt-I did, please Councilman Monahan-but stick to the subject if you possibly can. Supervisor Brandt -be a little respectful of other people. Councilman Monahan-Can you possibly stick to the subject of this meeting. Supervisor Brandt-I am sticking to the subject Councilman Monahan-No you are not. Supervisor Brandt-The subject is that we Councilman Monahan-The expansion of the Water Plant was the subject of this meeting was called for. Supervisor Brandt-When you are done with your filibuster I want to speak Councilman Monahan-If you wanted to discuss the other lets take another time today was put aside for expansion of the water plant. Supervisor Brandt-My God this is part of the expansion of the water plant this Board after it was elected wrote you a letter as a past Town Board and asked you not to build that facility because we had questions of where you were going and we have serious questions about management and how we are staffing and what we need and those are questions that we will address and it is a danm shame that we build a system for a management style that we have and a structure that we have before we have a chance to address it. I take deep offense with that plus we would right now have two million dollars in our coffers toward this plant expansion except it got spent. I do not think it was spent wisely and I think that is a matter of public concern. Mr. Philo-Thank you. Supervisor Brandt-Ok, now, any other questions especially engineering wise from Mr. Geiss-May I comment what the comment with the Fire Dept. was? Our recommendations at the end of the report were for fifteen million gallon a day treatment plant based on the results of the report. They were not specific to do the administration building first, there were a whole list of items in the recommendations of the report and I reference it to those is what our engineering recommendation were. I think they are very important to address in the order that we stated. A second point that you referenced on clear well, yes you are putting in additional clear well capacity or you discussed it, however, you are talking about the high lift remaining in the existing clear well now something could happen to the new clear well the high lift would still work, something whatever happens, somebody falls in as the Fire Dept. said to the existing clear well, well the existing clear well is actually a high lift pumping station and a clear well so if anybody falls in that or if Ralph has trouble when he is cleaning it out or whatever, that pumping station is done or its off line. Unknown-That can be...that can be .. Mr. Quentin Kestner-What is the probability ... Mr. Geiss-Excuse me I am talking right now. I am addressing a question that was asked with the duel operation of the clear well and the duel facilities. Councilman Caimano-Nobody interrupted you when you were talking. Mr. Quentin Kestner-Well I thought we were going into... Councilman Caimano- Weare not, we are not you have interrupted him three times let him finish. Supervisor Brandt-I think the Board set the tone on that one. Councilman Caimano-I do too. Mr. Geiss-Excuse me I apologize, but I was going on a thought. The clear well and I am looking at it was that by putting the pumping station a new clear well in solving the problems that we recognize you were then going to make a pumping station that could avail itself of either or or both clear wells when it operated. Yes, a million dollars, whatever the dollars factor is but we looked at the ability to operate with either or, or both and the fact that you had a clear well didn't affect the operation of your pumping away from the treatment plant and that is what we were looking at with the new pumping station there. Some problems occurred some heat build up some vortexing whatever but also you were tied in to the clear well there is only one and one only. Now you have two clear wells and a pumping station is what the proposal is that we looked at and what we were looking at is part of the operation here. Clear well yes would be underneath the filters but you would have a separate pumping station just off there that you could interconnect with the existing clear well and have either or, or both be available for pumping and to give you the backup and the redundant facility during operation. Thank you. Mr. VanDusen-1 have an operational question on your proposal. If the town decides to go to ten million are we going to be able to operate the plant while you upgrade those clarifiers and still meet the standards...one clarifier for an extended time while the other is hooked up? Mr. Geiss-Yes you would be I would envision the phasing of operation phasing of construction is very critical in doing that. first constructability that I envision would be that you would build the additional filters number one ok, so that the filters would be on line and operating. While you are building the filters you would cover the clarifiers also so before you do any of the other work you would have the clarifiers covered and the new filters installed. Now the filters would be your last treatment available to you but if you have the new filters on line if you then, your weather would not hamper your additional work on the clarifiers so you could do that work during the winter time. A low flow period I think good water quality or average water quality but you could pick the time of year that then the clarifiers would be affected with the facility. But you would also be at very low flow rate on your filters because you would then have twice the filtered area available to you to treat the water so your flow rate or your treatment rate would be half. So, you have got the line of protection to do the sequencing of construction but this also then affects you know where you got to do a sequence of construction in putting a project like this together and this is where our experience in working on plants has come in. That you have got to recognize that you got a time of year that certain work has to be done you have got to recognize that you have got to maintain water quality through those units. You would only work, or allow them to work on one unit at a time that then unit would come back into service and be fully operational before you would touch the other unit. Supervisor Brandt-Any other technical questions here from the Board? What I would like to do now is adjourn this thing go get some lunch and then if the Board wants to reconvene either to this afternoon or at some other time start to digesting what we.. Councilman Caimano- I would and I would like to say just one quick thing. I cannot reconvene this afternoon because I have something else to do and she will kill me if I don't. I would like to say this. I certainly understand the situation with the eight hundred thousand dollars and the administration plant, I think if you, if the truth be known. I was there at the meeting and asked the same thing. I would like to suggest however that this is a separate topic that what we are charged here with doing is finding out whether we should expand this plant and how we should expand it. I think we should do our very, very level best to separate the two topics one being the administration and whatever arguments that we have with and for and about them and the other doing what we are supposed to do for the people of the Town of Queensbury and that is protecting them and in this case with a drinking water plant. So, I would hope that we could separate those. Supervisor Brandt-Nick I want to comment on that, I think that they are related. Councilman Caimano-I don't...go ahead. Supervisor Brandt-Well, I hate to take on two filibusters, I think that the office facilities that you build are related to the management philosophy that you have and this Board has to pick its management philosophy and I think it wanted to look at that. I think it had a right to and it should have been given that chance to do it before it was forced into spending the money. If you want my opinion it was a political decision to drain the coffers so that we could not make the decision. I think it stinks and I want it on the record and I think it is wrong and I think it has done, it has been a dis-service to the taxpayers of this community and now despite that we have to make the right decisions and we will and I do not think there is any confusion of where we are going or what we are doing, I think we are going to make the right decisions it is too danm bad we did not get a chance to make them all. Councilman Caimano-I wasn't filibustering against you I was talking to Tom Philo not you, I am talking now too, so I will just have the microphone and I say again I don't not understand what you just said I understand it fully. I understand it is a topic that has to be taken care of it has nothing to do with whether Mr. Kestner or Mr. O'Brien and Gere or whoever puts together a plant which solves the problem of the people. I ask that we try when we have these arguments separate them because one becomes very technical and financial in nature and the other becomes very emotional. Who manages the plant afterwards is another matter, right now we have to decide if indeed we are going to have an expansion of the plant do we need an expansion of the plant, I think we do. How much is that going to be that's the decision we have to make first and we can argue the other later. I would like to keep those arguments separate that is all. Supervisor Brandt-I think there is no question we all agree that the water plant needs to be expanded, the question is how much and the question is how we are going to finance it. That gets into the operating philosophy and I think they are related in that way. Unknown-Mike I would ask you a question about the addition dry well of Kestner's proposal or clear well...is that redundant too? Mr. Quentin Kestner-Well, we would connect it to the both the high lift pump station and to the existing filters, you could yes, you could do that. Mr. Mark Kestner-You could also segregate what is in the existing high lift pump area. Unknown-Right now if something happens to the existing clear well ...pump from the additional clear well... Mr. Kestner-Right...yes you could do that. Supervisor Brandt -Ok fine. Mr. LaFlure-One more comment, Mike, just as under the guise of not trying to over simplify this I see excellent ideas from both of these engineering firms if we could somehow melt these two units together to get what is best on both sides wise and operational wise I think it would be very easy to come up with a plan to come up with something in the middle between these two projects and solve the problem. Supervisor Brandt-Motion to adjoum... Introduced by Mr. Nick Caimano Seconded by Mrs. Susan Goetz Meeting adjourned Respectfully submitted, Miss Darleen M. Dougher