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LFd 06182018 OPS 1 OPERATIONS COMMITTEE MEETING Monday, June 18, 2018 3:30 p.m. Conference Room 1st Floor Present: Richard Solbrig, John Thiel, Paul Hughes, Jim Jones, Kelly Sheehan, Heidi Baugh, Jessica Henderson Public: None A meeting was held to discuss the following: TOPICS DISCUSSION 1. PUBLIC COMMENTS. None. 2. CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS a) Plant Emergency Generator Replacement (Cal Electro Inc.) • The project is proceeding well. Contractor is now working on Site 1 (Generator Building site) and Site 2 (Breakpoint site). Since we pulled our FEMA funding application due to ongoing delays, we have released the Contractor from the August 1 “hold” related to the initial FEMA schedule. Contractor is gladly moving in early on Site 1 - the work at Site 1 was on a very tight schedule to get out of the ground within the grading season and start on the building before winter sets in. • The new generator should be in place and operation by next Fall (2019). • The new sodium hypochlorite line went in last week. Contractor found a number of known and unknown utility lines during their trenching for the new sodium hypochlorite line that were no longer in use. We were able to install the new line without fittings. The pipe is HDPE pipe fused on site to form a single pipe segment. • A smaller standby generator has been set up and tested. This will provide backup power to the headworks if needed during certain parts of the project when it will be disconnected from the existing backup power grid. • John will look for a good time to take the Operations Committee out to the work site for a field visit. Mostly just trenching, utility locating and relocating going on these days. b) DVR Irrigation/ C Hydro (Thomas Haen Co) • We still have a few items to resolve with SCADA, install antennas, and work out a few bugs to do with the irrigation pivots and controls. • This week we will disc in the wheat crop and plant our alfalfa. We are assured by our farm consultant that the timeline is still on track. We were hoping to have had the alfalfa already planted. c) Fallen Leaf Lake (District) • Lots of work happening, mostly by District crews with some assistance by White Rock Construction. • FL4 – by the Fire Station. A new concrete pad has been completed and our new genset and the Fire Department genset have been installed. We are finalizing the Agreement with the FLL Fire Department for them to have the option to use our standby generator for their uses if the need should arise. Great cooperation with the District and the Fire Department out there. The fire chief has been very complementary of our crews and the work completed. • Other two major work components are electrical pump station conversions at FL8 and FL9. John has finalized all of the easement agreements with the homeowners at both sites, a process that was initially started in 2014. • At FL9 our crews completed the excavation and brought electrical and controls conduit in. We hired Ebright to build a slab and retaining wall. Our crews then installed the control panel and masts for electrical and communications. Liberty is scheduled to complete the power connection this week. Our crews will then install the new electric pumps and abandon the vacuum system at that location. 2 • FL8 – that is about 500’ further down the road. A very challenging site due to the narrow road, with the lake on one side and steep slope and large boulders on the other. Very little room for traffic and owner parking. We are coordinating our work when they don’t have visitors at their cabin. John put together a retaining wall design. White Rock Construction completed excavation and construction of this reinforced concrete retaining wall about two weeks ago. Forms were stripped today and backfill will be completed tomorrow. They will also install some slope protection, seeding, and final site grading and cleanup. We may want to install some rock on the slope to protect that area from erosion. • Our electricians are building the panel now. Should be installed by the end of the month. Thereafter, we plan to have Ebright back out to install some decorative rock and tie the new work in with the existing rock retaining wall. d) Ponderosa Waterline (Sierra Nevada Construc-tion) • Contractor has complete paving. We paved about half the street width throughout the project. John and Steve met with the City and agreed this was the best paving solution for the area. The City was very helpful and provided some onsite inspection during the paving operations. • The paving was the final contract element for SNC. We will start the closeout process. • The 22 water service transfers for this area are discussed below. See Item 4a. e) Water Meters Phase 4 • Construction is going well, ahead of schedule, no significant problems. We are completing about 100 per week now. Over 300 new meters have been installed. John is happy with the progress, our inspection team, and with the changes implemented since last year’s project. • We are also replacing all of the square top water valves as we encounter them. Our crews have found them to be poor valves with many problems with leaks or they break when we try to use them. So far, it looks like these replacements will be within our existing bid quantities. We had projected a large number of service valve replacements in the Tahoe Sierra neighborhood. We are replacing about 15% at this point. • Contractor also installed a new valve while in the project area. Existing valve had recently broken. Another main line valve replacement is being planned for the Cold Creek area. We are talking to our Underground Repair guys for anything else that needs replacement while in the meter project area. f) Marlette Waterline • Thomas Haen Company is our contractor on this project. They have been working for about 1.5 weeks; just doing the meter installations at this point. • Mainline installation to begin next week. • This project will include about 66 service transfers. More discussion on this topic is located at Item 4a. 3. PLANNING / DESIGN a) Fire Hydrants, Service Valves, Pine Valley PRV, and Forcemain Bypass Stations • These three projects have been bid under “2018 Water and Sewer System Improvements” project. Bids open this Friday. • John is planning for this work to begin in August to coincide with the completion of the Marlette project – this way we can use the same inspector for both projects. b) Sierra Blvd Waterline • We have completed our design and passed it along to the City. • Looks like the City will not bid this out until August and so most of the work will actually occur next season. c) Keller-Heavenly Improvements • District comments on 30% plans went back to Farr West to finalize design work. • Staff has set up a meeting with KGID to visit and check out their concrete tank. We are seriously considering using this type of tank for this project. When you look at the cost 3 from a life cycle perspective they are very close to the same price. A concrete tank will not have the recoating requirements of a welded steel tank at this very challenging location. We believe a concrete tank will be more likely to resist falling rock in the distant future as the rockfall protection system degrades over time. • We have two funding sources in progress, FEMA and SRF. Due to decreasing funds, the SRF funding sources will be more selective in the future. John is concerned about the availability of these funds. We may want to look at private financing again. d) Waterline Replacement /Fire Flow Projects • We are developing a comprehensive waterline replacement plan. The focus will be on providing fire flow but will also consider aging waterlines, leak history, condition assessment and other factors. At this point, John is estimating about 60 projects in the $1.5M range. Projects are being sized to be attractive for bidders and for overall implementation through design and construction. This is the first cut with many details and efficiencies to be completed. • We will be prioritizing these projects by the end of the summer and in support of the 218 effort. We will then be refining each project in the next step, perhaps changing project boundaries, looking for constructability improvements, eliminating certain pipeline segments, reducing cost wherever possible, etc. • We are identifying needs and prioritizing projects. The level of funding and the velocity of implementation will be at the direction of the Board. We will provide prioritized lists of projects with varying implementation schedules depending on a range of funding alternatives. e) Groundwater Management Planning South Y Plume Remediation Project: • We are continuing with our data collection efforts needed to develop and select a preferred alternative for removing contaminants at the Y. • We recently finished our core sampling and are still getting test results back on this. • Next will be drilling two test wells on the Eloise site. Well tests at this location will also be used to develop and evaluate potential treatment alternatives. • We have not seen anything new from Lahontan. • We need to make the legislators aware of where we sit with the cleanup. Then when there is action taken, we can reinforce that rate payers should not be paying for it. • Next public hearing will be July 31, August 1 or August 2. We have a call into the City to request that this meeting be taped. • We have concerns that the PCE plume is heading toward our Bayview Well and other Al Tahoe areas wells. We expect that could take some time – we are utilizing the groundwater to look at this. The more we pump there, however, the more we depress the groundwater and speed up contaminant transport. With this in mind, Engineering has met with Pumps and are changing the way we operation those wells, trying to reduce the pumping at Bayview especially. f) Fallen Leaf Lake • Continuing working on the system model and pump selection. • John is working with Pumps to design and complete the final abandonment of the vacuum system at the main station. • Design and installation of the system controls are coming up as well. We will be working with Carollo, our existing SCADA consultant on this. g) Big 5 Pump Stations • Carollo is still working on the seismic analysis and hydraulic deficiencies assessments. • Staff has started meeting with Carollo on the development of alternatives for each of the five pump stations projects based on results of the condition assessments. • We are looking at electrical and pump improvements at all of the stations. Concrete and other structures found to be in good condition. Seismic evaluation pending. • The Tahoe Keys Pump Station will require the most work with a new wet well and a new 4 pump vault to accommodate a 3-pump arrangement. We are currently having vibration problems with the pump at this location which leaves just one good pump available for operation. h) Sewer Collection System Assessment • Crews have looked at about 100 of the 368 pipes identified as a representative cross section of different pipe sizes, materials, locations, etc., that are found throughout our system. • John reported that we had more issues than expected in getting the new tv truck going. Computer and software issues mostly, not mechanical. Most of these have been ironed out and we are seeing some big days in recent weeks. • Crews got 1,000 feet out of one run. It can be very efficient. Took about half a day to set this up and run it. The new tv equipment collects data on site, back here our crews do the data download and code pipe condition which is very tedious and time consuming. Downloading and coding the data takes about 2 times the amount of work and time to actually collect the data. Part of this is due to the fact that the new camera has a better ability to see what is affecting our lines and thus playing into the longer time it takes to code the pipe. We are seeing a lot more cracks and other problems with this high quality equipment which would have been missed before. • We are looking into having an outside resource do the coding portion of this work for the next month or so given the aggressive schedule to see as many pipes as possible to inform the next 218 process. It looks like it will cost the same or less than if we have our own guys do it. The big question for outsourcing this work would be the question of the quality. We will have to do spot checks. 4. OTHER a) Water service transfers (Jessica Henderson) Ponderosa, Marlette, System-wide corrections • John estimates that about 180 properties will need to have relocated waterline connections over the next few years. About 88 of these have been identified for the Ponderosa and Marlette projects. The rest are being identified during the course of the meter project – we are finding multiple properties being served from a single main line connection in all sorts of crazy arrangements. On the bright side, we are doing a lot of great cleanup work as a derivative of the meter project. • We had asked property owners to contact a contractor to do this work and provide the bid to the District. Some of the bids came in at what we expected to see, while others came in at maybe double the expected price. There was also a very limited response from the property owners. • Staff met last week and determined that it is more cost effective and customer friendly to have the District handle the work. John estimates that we will save about $300,000 by doing the bulk of the 180 relocations with our contractors. We’ll see how the first group goes and make adjustments if needed. • We can use existing contractors that are under contract to complete some of the work. We are working with Haen on a change order to complete some installations and have added a $150,000 line item to the 2018 Water and Sewer System Improvements bid for these water service relocations. The water service relocation work will be done on Time & Materials basis and we will use one of our inspectors to cover the work. • Shelly and Jess sent a letter to these customers informing them that the District has decided to do the relocations another way than having them find someone to do it. When Jess contacted the customers who had submitted bids, all (with the exception of one) were extremely happy that were taking this over. They don’t really want to deal with it. • Shelly has written up a contract to be used for any customer who chooses to get the work done on their own using their own contractor, limiting the District’s obligation to pay up to $5,000 for the work. 5 b) AMI / WaterSMART Towers • With three new towers installed and operational, the AMI is now officially reading at 97%. The fluctuations between 97-97.5% are mostly due to the meters being under too much dirt or the antennas are not connected. • We were able to do our first billing using the AMI system data. • With respect to WaterSMART, District has had 12% of eligible customers sign up during our first 3 months. We were told we could expect maybe 15% during the first six months. This is encouraging. c) Recent Operational Issues • We received some dirty water complaints at the complex across the street from the Whole Foods project – at Sugar Pine Bakery, etc. They closed early today because of the water. We are flushing out the water. We expect the problem may have something to do with how fast they are opening the lines – they have a meter on a hydrant being used for construction water. John sent our inspector to assist and perhaps modify the process at the project site. • We were also contacted about one of the sewer laterals out there (unused) was blocked. Had a plumber run a camera down it and found an electric line in one of our lines—looks like 3 lines that Caltrans would be responsible for. GB General Engineering is doing work out there. Caltrans has been notified. • Reminder that the Summit, and Diamond Valley Ranch Irrigation Improvements Project and C-Hydro ribbon cutting is scheduled for August 21 and 22. 5. ADJOURNMENT Next Ops Mtg. Next Operations Committee meeting will be held on Monday, August 13, 2018, 3:30 p.m.