captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- >> i would like to call the meeting of the public utilities commission to order. vice-president moran: here. commissioner caen: here. commissioner courtney: here. >> commissioner vietor is excused. >> we have to work harder.

mr. secretary, if would call the next item. >> that would be the approval of minutes of the special joint meeting on may 5, 2011. >> moved and seconded. link electronics, inc. model number: pdr-885 software version: 3.0c address the commission on the items not on the agenda today. we have no speaker cards. >> do we have any speakers? seeing none, moving on to communications. >> the commissioners have received electronically copies of all of the letters in the summary. are there any questions regarding the staff report admitted in this packet? >> i have a comment on the

letter summary? regarding the impact of climate change and storage and those of you who have been around for awhile now that i have been a big advocate of more storage. i would point that in your direction for observation. >> i had a conversation with staff a little while ago about the same subject. the conclusions of that are somewhat interesting. i do not know if staff wants to speak to that. at the climate change modeling we have done indicates that we are relatively untouched by that. in terms of the effect on an odd

mix of what elevation our watershed is at a what water rights we have. >> i am speaking about the ability to capture rainfall. you need some kind of container to have the ring go into it. >> thank you. any other comments on the communications or the staff report? any public comment? hearing none, on two other commission business. commissioners, i have just a couple of items. first, i understand that item 9e is not ready for action at this time . we thispull that -- will pull that.

i had a conversation earlier today. we discussed several of the items that were on the agenda today where contracts have multiple modifications over time. some of them are obviously going to happen. others look to be items that we could learn from and do better at in the future and perhaps making a better understanding for these conditions. there is clearly an informal process in place to do a post- mortem on a lot of these situations. we can learn from that what we can. one thing that struck me is that it would be useful and important to have the informal process more formalized to make sure

that as we have surprises, that we learn from them to the extent that we can. to make sure that if there were mistakes, that they are not repeated. that is something that she has been working within her own staff for. we could proceed to formalize that. at some appropriate time, you could come back to the commission to describe your progress. the last comment, i believe this is the last meeting for somebody that has been promoted. she will be going over here. the good news is that she is staying in the family. i want to thank you for your work in support of us over the years. we will miss you. it is good to know that you will

be around. and the other commission business? mr. secretary. >> the next item would be the report of the general manager. >> good afternoon, commission. today we have just one item in the general manager's report. it is an update for the water system program. >> good afternoon, commissioners. mr. secretary, if you could hook up the computer. your packet should include a copy of our latest report for the latest quarter of this fiscal year. this covers december 26 through

april 2. the publication of this report was delayed by a few weeks because it is essentially going to be the basis for the program revisions that we will be presenting to you in july. i advised you a month or so ago that we would be coming back to secure approval for budget. if you do approve those, we would turn to the revisions of the department of public health and safety -- safety seismic commissions. i wanted to thank the opportunity to thank my team for the extra effort and diligence that went into this particular report. we want to come out with as accurate of a forecast as possible. that is our understanding of project risks. starting with an overview of our local program, these are as of

april 1. the number in parentheses are the projects in each stage. we only have five of our 40 local projects remaining. three of those five projects are actually water supply projects. during the third quarter, we move to the hunters point reservoir project from reservoir construction. we wanted to remind you that about 72% of the total project value is allocated with two large water supply projects. we wanted to point out that we have five ongoing local projects in construction and two-thirds of our local projects have had their construction completed. similar formats for the regional program, and here we only have

six projects. six out of our 46 regional projects remaining. two of those six projects are support projects. habitat reserve program and watershed improvement program. during the reporting quarter, we reached $2.3 billion worth of product construction. if later today you approve the construction, the piece of the pie will grow by $423 million. during the quarter, the replacement project went from this, and we also had three projects move into construction. that would be the water improvement project, the dam project, and the replacement project. as of april 2, we completed construction on two-thirds of our regional projects.

another familiar slide where we compare the variances on schedule and costs from the last reporting quarter to this quarter. you can see that we are forecasting program costs to be $148 million less than the approved budget. that is on the regional side. this is a $27 million reduction in the savings we had accumulated under the approved budget. the forecasted completion of the regional program is now eight months later than what was reported in the previous quarter. this is still tied to the project. i will explain that later in my presentation. focusing on the last to the appeal columns, we are forecasting to be $43 million

over the approved project. that is a $12 million increase over the last quarter. the majority of this increase are associated with two of our local water supply projects. the forecasted completion date on the local project is about 22 months later. this is a nine-month slip from the last quarter. >> that is in months. nine months? >> lighter than what was predicted. >> the west side recycle water project has encountered major challenges where a number of public comments have forced us to take a step back and look at finding alternatives to the current recommended site in

golden gate park. we have conducted a number of workshops to address those comments. those have been completed. we are now starting up this phase. the project was essentially put on hold pending these three sets of workshops. we are working very closely with the water supply group to facilitate that process. this is a chart that i also share with you every quarter. it shows the approved budget in red in comparison to the forecasted costs in blue. we continue to have forecasted cost that is well below

approved. with respect to the last quarter, the savings were reduced by $39 million. it is important to keep in mind that we are still forecasting to underrun are approved budget by $5 million. let's look a little bit at the breakdown of the forecasted cost change between the second and third quarters. what you see in the boxes are the changes from q3 to q2. the red ones are cost increases. this has increased by 40.5 and $13.8 million respectively. our construction costs have decreased for a net of $39

million. these are costs associated with project management and our various environmental efforts, construction management, as well as other soft costs. other costs include costs associated with mitigation, improvements, and real estate to spend -- expenses. overall, the increase in costs are attributed to a limited number of projects. shown here are the projects that have had the largest increases in costs. he'd appear projects have had very large increases over $10 million. that increase is based on a new 35% design cost. the previous metric was based

on a conceptual engineering estimate. it did not include a number of issues that we have to deal with including a real-estate transaction as well as a much longer schedule for that project. in the case of the peninsula pipeline seismic upgrade project, the increases with refinement for the project based on the latest geo technical information, the decision was made to replace a number of pipeline segments on the peninsula where we are vulnerable to liquefaction. this is in the -- in to the additional scope in three different occasions. i will elaborate more on the cost increases. more from that perspective later in my presentation. >> it does occur to me that a

couple of the projects we have been tracking in terms of costs have had some cost increases. if you could just give me an update on that spread sheet you give me from time to time. >> in the reporting quarter, we have some projects that we were forecasted to complete almost six months later. i wanted to elaborate more on the regional projects, which are the four above the darker line. this is a project that is now completed. it has reached the central completion. we need to keep the contract opened to allow the contractor to come back and perform some of the repairs at no cost to us. they accidently damage being closure of the generator on site. what is important to know is

that the facility is fully operational. we just need to extend the contract for the repair. for the peninsula pipeline, the addition of new scope has resulted in the increase in the project schedule. we added eight months to the project as a recommendation that came from a third party review in the design phase. the additional eight months was recommended to account for the temporary slow down or maybe even shut down of activities during hot and dry days to try to control the airborne asbestos that we may encounter. this is more of a contingency type addition to the project. finally, for the filter gallery, we did a review on that

project. this was recommended for two reasons. one was to be able to procure long lead items and this will deal with the work we will be doing that will build our environmental seasonal restrictions. now that i have highlighted the major changes at the project level, i wanted to summarize what did cause the cost increases and the leas report of this quarter. you should note that we follow the recommendation by our program adviser. late last year, he recommended that we produce more detailed resource plans where we identify every individual to be assigned to an activity and identified

the number of hours they would have to spend on a regular basis. we have done that before, but never at that level of detail. that has allowed us to get a better handle on how much resources we will require. in certain areas of delivery, we were requiring additional resources than we had initially predicted. there are two other major cost categories. r a incremental expenditures have gone up $23.9 million over the last quarter. that is contained in the costs. those increases are mostly associated with incremental mitigation requirements. the permitting of two dams

requires that we, in exchange, to give up a lot of medication in the form of new habitat restoration. along with facto additional resources to maintain compliance with all of these permit requirements. pushing back some of the completion dates of our projects has also required additional resources from the city staff and consultants that in the long run, add up to about $15 million. on the schedule delays, there are four categories that stood out to me. the water treatment plants, there were delays in getting the of our mental certifications. these have also caused delays. this has caused delays to the

peninsula pipeline project. there are delays that have impacted schedules. could be as simple as the generator accident. there were also a lot of complex issues in the field to deal with, such as the discovery of archaeological sties and contaminated soil that we are dealing with along the peninsula right now that has impacted schedules. finally, in the later stages of design, we oftentimes bring in an outside expert to review our schedules. based on their recommendation, we may have to adjust our schedule. this is what happened in the case of calaveras. we had to deal with naturally occurring the asbestos. i have a lot of good news to share with you. since of last reported on the

program, we have certified two eir's on two of our key projects. we have advertised at three contracts including very important contracts including calaveras and a very important part of the eastern pipeline system. we have advocated construction on six large projects including a water treatment plant, the western segment of the san joaquin county pipeline system, and the crystal springs pipeline replacement project. we completed construction on not towwo, but 3 project since we close the agenda today. we completed construction on two contracts. one achievement is the connection of the new crystal springs bypass tunnel to the system. this was early in the reporting

quarter. it required one of the most risky and challenging shutdowns of the entire program. the water enterprise deserves a lot of kudos to pull this off. we have completed 52 of the 108 shutdowns. on march 11, we started tunneling through the new tunnel. that was a major milestone. another milestone was the delivery to our project sites. they started rising in the last few weeks. this was still in japan during the last major earthquake. earlier this month, at the annual project management institute scheduling conference, we received the innovation award for are very innovative systems that we use. the cif as well as our control

systems. we also recognize how they were using that system to deliver our program. a summary of what was rewarded during the reported quarter. the first were actually awarded during the quarter and were presented savings totaling $120 million. the last contract shone for the calaveras dam is pending. it is one that that is before you today. what i would like to point out is that all but called million dollars of the savings shown on these slides were accounted for in the previous quarter. this is why last quarter the forecasted cost of the program went down so much. because these contracts were rewarded shortly after the close of last quarter, we were able to account for them in the quarter.

this quarter, we were only able to take credit for $12 million of the savings reported here. >> under the system security update, is that really true? >> it is really true. this is a contract that just got started. i can tell you right now, if the contractor missed something or there were some wrong assumptions made, we see that low of a bid on another small project before. it was an issue in the case. it will be monitored very closely. this is an unusual contract. it is not hard core construction. this involves providing security equipment. it is fairly unusual. it is not as easy to cost out. it is active right now.

>> i would guess there might be some oversight there. >> our job would be to hold the contractor responsible to deliver whenever they said they went on the contract. our next two slides track our performance. key milestones that are for the program. if the focus on what is in blue, that is this quarter. we were able to achieve two of the three milestones. this is a categorical exemption for the reservoir of rehab project. there were some delays in receiving the division of safety approval for the abatement stability assessment. now that we have that, we should be able to move forward with our temperamental documents. i hope that we will be able to reach that milestone this upcoming quarter.

on the regional side, we actually had a large number of milestones. we actually have 13. we achieved 12 of them. actually, 11. we missed the lauren livermore milestone. the delay was due to the fact that the -- was issued late but more importantly, the wet weather conditions we encountered prevented us to move as quickly as we would have liked to.

we are dealing with a key different headings to. tunneling operation started in late april. this was very exciting. this was taken yesterday. we will do all the work under the bay for 5 miles. this will be followed by a year -- a gear