The San FranciscoPublic UtilitiesCommission Meeting of february 13, 2024. So, we are calling the San FranciscoPublic UtilitiesCommission Regular meeting of february 13, to order. Roll call, please. President paulson, present. Vice president rivera is excused. Commissioner ajami, here. Commissioner maxwell, here. Commissioner stacy, here. We have a quorum. Thank you. So, before we get to the first item, i like to announce that the San FranciscoPublic Utilities commission we acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush Ohlone have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. As guests, we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors and relatives of the ramaytush community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Donna, can you call the first item . Approval of the minutes of january 22, 2024 special meeting, january 23, 2024 regular meeting, january 26, special meeting. January 29, 2024 special meeting and february 2, 2024 special meeting. Are there any corrections or comments on any of the minutes from these past meetings commissioners . Seeing none, well open this to Public Comment. Any members of the public present to provide comment on any of the minutes . Seeing none. Seeing none, can we get a motion and second to approve the minutes for those numerous meetings . Move to approve. Second. Roll call, please. Paulson, aye. Maxwell, aye. Ajami, aye. Stacy, aye. Four ayes. Item 4, general Public Comment. Donna, can you open item 4 is general Public Comment. Members of the public may address matters within the Commission Jurisdiction but not on todays agenda. I have speaker cards. First mr. Ducosta. Mr. Rosecrans. Dave warner, denise louie and if you not turned in a card you can stand on the side. Commissioners, today i want to talk about our pipes, drinking pipes, sewer pipes, pipes leading to hiderants. So, we need a hearing on how you are going to address fixing the pipes on the west side that has now been transferred or was transferred because of insufficient money to the sfpuc. It is important that those hydrants have the pressure if there is a fire. Otherwise well have the same type of situation we had in hawaii. The citizens of San Francisco, we had agreed a long time ago when karen cubic was there that at least twice a year we would get some sort of a report on the clean Drinking Water pipes and the sewer pipes that had to be replaced. We havent heard anything. I know the pandemic came in the way, but that doesnt mean we dont have a hearing. We need a hearing on those issues. Thank you very much. Thank you, next speaker. Thank you good afternoon commissioners. Always a pleasure to come to city hall and see the happy people getting married in the hallway. A neat thing. I come today to correct the record from three weeks ago when i spoke to the substance of the m oa between sfpuc and National Park service. The commission asked there had been public review. Staff indicated it was the responsibility of the National Park service. Im not sure why it is the responsibility of one party and not the other, however on june 1 last year we asked the park service to review the draft moa, it was denied. We asked the puc and National Park service in writing on june 19 in a letter to mr. Herrera and the superintendent. We didnt receive a response. On september 26, sent a letter to the Park Services opining on elements of the moa as well as other things. I know the city generally and the sfpuc in particular prides itself on the opportunity for public review on issues before it. There was no such opportunities in this case. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Im dave warner. Thank you for your service. It is honor to speak to you today. Two items. Quick request you reinstate remote Public Comment. Some other commissions and committees have remote Public Comment including the revenue bond over sited committee, Citizen Advisory Committee and port commission. These are just ones i have come across. The approach to reopen remote Public Comment until experiment until such time there is hate speech or inappropriate behavior. Ideally that will never happen. Item 2, i also like to thank sfpuc for doing such a great job during our last set of storms. It demonstrates the years of experience and expertise and very lucky to have them all. Thank you. It is a quality organization. Thank you. Thank you mr. Warner. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon. Denise louie here. Member of the scepter for biological diversity and puc customer. Again, i urge you to withdraw puc lawsuit against the state water board and give you a few reasons why you should remove the lawsuits. One, the bay delta ecosystem is verging on collapse. Two, because the puc water enterprise Environmental Stewardship policy states the puc entrusted to manage resources is committed to responsible Natural Resource management that protects and restore viable populations of native specious and maintains integrity of the ecosystems that support them for current and future generations. Three, because this policy the water enterprise Environmental Stewardship policy says the puc strives to be a leader in science based Environmental Stewardship, meaning, there is no basis for pursuing your voluntary agreement. Another reason for dropping the voluntary agreement and lawsuits is the city general plans Environmental Protection element, which directs the city to restore improve the quality of Natural Resources and protect rare endangered specious and natural habitat including the bay. There are even higher authorities, but this should be enough to meet your responsibility to immediately drop puc voluntary agreements and lawsuits for the sake of our internationally recognized significant bay delta. Time is of the essence, the fish cannot hold on much longer, they are already threatened with extinction and policies and words dont mean anything if you dont take science based and proenvironment action. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please, come to the microphone. Good afternoon. Peter dreckmyer policy directser for Tuolumne River trust. You had a conversation about the demand projections. There was water enterprise that creates projections for the urban Water Management plan and finance bureau that does the sales projections for the budget and they have been very very different, so i applaud you, especially commissioner ajami and at the time commissioner maran. I thought it was interested i dummied one up and thought it would be interesting and we waited two months and no word about a response, so we encouraged then president moran to add items requested by commissioners at the bottom of the advance calendar so it isnt wasnt forgotten, which he did and couple months passed and said how about putting a date on that so 6 months later in july there was a great report, very honest that compared the two and found that the finance bureau overprojected some and the water enterprise overprojected a lot and thats really important information, especially when you are talking about things like the budget. I am also really appreciated commissioner ajami on november 28 mentioned it is good to know how lower sales would effect the budget and affordability. That wasnt added to the advance calendar and hope that process hasnt gone away, but that would have been good information to have. Finally, we are still waiting for the alternative water supply plan. The draft was june 30 and it has been 7 months, so nice to see that on advanced calendar and wonderful if we can get three minutes like we did before covid. With covid a lot more people were able to participate so made sense to minimize it to two, but three minutes would be helpful. Thank you for your comments. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon commissioners paulson, maxwell and everyone else. Liz jackson simpson, ceo of Success Center and provide Workforce Development services here in San Francisco. I am speaking today on support of the sip program. The sip Program Provides education Workforce Development and arts service to Community Members and i just wanted to insure this program stays in tact. We have been beneficiaries of it. As you know our grant dollars only do so much to provide training to people but huge gaps in service exist from these very restrictive dollars, but the sip program dollars allow us to provide things like, tools and union dues and one of my clients needed prescription goggle tuesday go to work. These are huge barriers that keep people from livable wage jobs. We continue to support and provide Case Management once folks are placed because this is very temporary work so providing support to constituents to go through 18 to 20 weeks of training every day to prepare and get ready for these jobs we want to make sure they continue to stay employed so they can thrive here in our beautiful city of San Francisco, so i have information here about how some of the sip programs and partnership with web corp and building and trades Council Supports those in Bayview Hunter point and San Francisco at large to provide these services. We were recognized by department of labor this past august for this very innovative intermediary we created that exist no where in the region, let alone in the city or country see ill leave the information here for you review. Thank you for your time. Thank you for those words. Public comment. If you like to speak please come to the microphone. Next. If there are those, please come to the microphone. Well call you. Good afternoon. My name is Mary Butterwick a long time resident of San Francisco. At several meetings members asked the commission to revisit the extremely conservative 8. 5 year design drought. The primary tool used for managing flow releases. The 8. 5 year design drought has a return period of once in 25 thousand years. I do not believe this is the reasonable approach for managing flow release on the Tuolumne River particularly damaging to the river and environment during dry periods when quality of life needs adequate flow the most. I urge the commission to reduce the length of design drought by one year, apply reasonable demand projections and present the results to the public. These actions would go a long way towards addressing the perceived water supply needs and hope fully facilitate a meaningful dialogue on the instream flows needed to restore and maintain a sustainable population of salmon in the Tuolumne River. I urge the commission to drop the lawsuit against the state water board bay delta plan and work with the state to insure flows in the tuolumne are consistent with instream flow standard adopted by the state in 2018. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Please. [indiscernible] we are on Public Comment. If you have general Public Comment that has not on the agenda you like to address, please come to the microphone. [indiscernible] if it is on the agenda well call it during the course of the agenda. Thank you. Are there anymore folks for Public Comment . Okay. Seeing none, are there any other folks that have called in . Seeing no more Public Comment, we will go to item number 5, which is the report of the general manager. Thank you mr. President. Nothing to report. Okay. Thank you. So, we will go to item 6, which is the consent calendar. And i am going to ask, are there any commissioners have any comments, questions or about any item . Commissioner maxwell. I have a question regarding 6a. Item 6a. With that contract . I see that maybe katie miller could ask that question and maybe you have a question while she gets to the mic. Yes. It says that the staff proceeding to perform additional outreach pursuant to consultant feedback so they revised the subconsultant qualification requirements, because there was only onethere were not enough people. I wanted to know what that revision was . It says, consultant feedback revised subconsultant qualification requirement. Yes. Thank you commissioner. Katie miller, director of water capital programs. I do have notes here and i can answer that directly. We reduced a couple of the requirements in order to attract a greater consultant community, so one thing was there was a onsite mechanical engineer and we reduce the onsite stationing requirement from 80 percent of the time to 50 percent of the time to make it easier for that person to be there and reduced the qualifications for that mechanical engineer from 10 to 5 years experience. There were also modified language for qualification requirements to avoid uncertainty related to references to the terms similar and instead refer to quantifyable parameters. We eliminated restriction for holding key lead position. Concerns related to original language mitigated by new requirement elsewhere must be employee of the prime proposer or lead jv partner. We tried to clean up the language, reduce the subconsultant requirements so we could attract a broader community, and then reopen that advertise for bids. Did that work . Well, it did. We also did several other things. We increased the maximum allowable billing rate, and we changed some of the professional Liability Insurance requirements. That was something we heard because it was dealing with the emergency Fire Fighting water system, some feedback we got is they were concerned about liability with Fire Insurance with theand so i think with some of the consultants didnt bid because of that reason. Even though we dpot zero bidders the first time we did extensive outreach the second time and still only got one bidder, however the firm is qualified and we are looking forward working with them. So, one of the bigger issues was the insurance. Professional Liability Insurance concern. Okay. Are you thinking then is there anything else that you can do next time . Im hoping this was unique to this contract and, but we did learn a lot about it. Raising the maximum allowable billing rate to be more in line with market conditions. Another is to reduce the subconsultant requirement to attract more local jv partners, smaller firms for subs and jv for a higher Participation Rate of local contractors and those carried through to the current contracts, so i think those will help us be more successful in the future and with good lessens learned from this. Great. Thank you. Are there any othercommissioner ajami. I was wondering when you reduce the subcontract requirements, i assume those subcontracts have not gone out yet, have that . They were part of the package so they were already included with the team being awarded. When you reviewed those, those reducing those requirement, did it have a impact or do you think partly the reason we did not get a lot of bids was because our hourly rate was lower . Just trying to understand, which of these changes lead into at least getting one bid . I think it was a combination of all the things, the outreach, the Liability Insurance and casting a broader net for subconsultants. The higher billing rate allowed the consultant to bring on specialists for this that we probably would have allowed by exception to contract after the fact, but by allowing it now it made it easier to bring on the specialists we really want for this type of work, so i think that was helpful, and reducing the years for the partners for the subconsultants, i think allowed us to tap into local. We did pick up a local subcontractors on this contract, so i think that was very helpful as well. Commissioner maxwell. Thank you. So, do you have a process or strategy so your outreach is consistent . Sometimes you dont do a lot, sometimes you do more. Do you have an outreach strategy to always try to get we do. We do. Why was this then why did you center have to go back if you always do . Steven robinson, assistant general manager frucktd. Infrastructure. There is standard process to engage when we have solicitation coming up and as katie mentioned this felt unique for reasons we talked about today. Perhaps primarily the liability and concern working on our emergency Fire Fighting wate