to delay that for 4 years but i wanted to point out that right now the current rates -- people that have families that are in tier 2, for the tier 2 units are paying $10 and $0.53 that's 6 percent higher than the recommended uniform rate going out 4 years so it seems that families households are larger and therefore using more water and are in tier 2, have been subsidizing tier 1 users for many many years and we used to have 3 tiers now down to 2 and going to 1, but i think you should take another look at this point why would the uniform rate being proposed in the future be less than the tier 2 right now thank you very much. >> thank you again for being here. >> is there a short response to

that question? >> thank you commissioner vietor. >> todd rydstrom assistant general manager and cfo we have in the past looked at our rates both water and sewer to provide indicators to conserve the water and so this, under new legal -- not case law but legal practice -- has been discovered that we should move towards a uniform rate and this is one example where we're proposing to smooth rates over the next 4 years to move to a single uniform rate for sewer that will level ize rates and make

the calculations easy but however on the other hand it takes away the price signal for water conservation because we have a combined bill never the less it's before you and to make it gradual we proposed it as as a 4-year smoothing. >> commissioner moran. >> thank you also on 5 l we are talking about the proposed regulations for admin ist ering -- the rate let's just make one observation in the enforcement section as i read it the penalty for not reducing or not curtailing your your usage during a drought is that

it would revert to what it would be otherwise ends up being a free bee so when they don't interrupt it goes up to the regular rate seems as though there ought to be some other provision in there. either trying to recapture the difference between the regular rate and interruptible rate for the period they enjoyed that and something that makes it not a free ride and the other part i didn't see basically a shut off provision my assumption is these are metered services and they can be shut off if somebody is not complying and that should be in the regulation as well. thank you. >> thank you commissioner moran all right so we're still on item number 5. is there any other public comment on this item. seeing no objection and

no public comment public comment is now closed. >> next item please. >> item 6 is other business. >> first of all i did get a communication from the public during the course of last week about mission delores related to underground water going on at the construction site for anyone who's for anyone who's been there there's a renovation on i believe it's the south side so i did reach out to recreation and parks department staff as well as our own staff, so i'd like to get a report on the status of the ground water and if there's any plans related to the ground water there, i'd like a report at the next meeting if that's possible so communication has been sent in anticipation of possible public comment today which i don't see any public

comment. >> commissioner torres? >> the other item is fast approaching is the joint environment commission and public utilities commission meeting scheduled and noticed for may 27th. we did have a discussion actually a couple of discussions about that meeting it's a pretty important meeting it's just about upon us and i'd like to engage the commission on topics starting with the notion that while often times we receive a lot of attention for the things that we don't do for the environment there's an awful lot of opportunity to talk about the things we do do for the environment and we already heard from francisco, decosta and friends of camp mather so i'd like to open that to

possible reports at the joint meeting commissioner vietor? >> i would also like to take advantage of this opportunity to congratulate the new director of the department of the environment that has been appointed debbie rafael and we could do that also when we have the joint meeting and i'd be happy to work on the agenda in advance with you and contribute some thoughts on that and debbie was someone that when i was the director from the department of the environment i recruited from santa monica and she was many years later recruited by the govern er and coming back to san francisco to head up the department and i think it's a wonderful appointment and i'm glad that she will be in place to help and i'd encourage us to as we put together the agenda to ask

about her thoughts and ideas what would make for a productive and fruitful meeting. >> thank you commissioner vietor my interest is along those lines but in addition to that to provide staff with an adequate opportunity to prepare presentations i envision a number of different brief but hard hitting presentations coming from puc staff related to wastewater management, our 100 percent renewable objectives and some of the other water conservation that we have going on and jobs exponent and i hope you and i can have a more robust conversation about it off online and we have city staff and outside staff basically applying a lot of chemicals in the local environment i'd like to shed some light on that but if we're in agreement on some of the basic concepts then we

can t up staff to do that thing they do and begin to kind of expose some of the good work that we're already doing related to the environment and begin to talk about the objectives and common areas and any other initiatives that we may be able to agree on. are there any objections to at least giving staff an opportunity to make a few different presentations related to some larger topics that are directly related to the mission of the environment and the environment commission? >> yes. general manager kelly. >> what i would like to add or have you consider as you identify the topics maybe staff can talk about the opportunities that we can have or some of the challenges so that that it can be more of a dialogue versus just a presentation. >> right and do my colleagues

agree with that? commissioner vietor? >> i'm interested in what they are going to talk about. >> they are interested in telling us what we're interested in talking about we have 2 hours commissioner torres and i think what we can t up for ourselves is what we already know we have expertise and we have a record of accomplishment and i think you know, i would like to see more regular engagement with this department and with this commission i think it makes an awful lot of sense but i think we have to get staff. it's now what? may 13th? and so the meeting is in 14 days i think we have to really give staff an opportunity to present on key critical issues that we're dealing with. commissioner moran? >> thank you one thing that occurs to me is that we often

think about the provision of hetch hetchy power as a cost benefit the fact is we also provide assistance to city departments to minimize their consumption and above and beyond the rates that we provide to the city's departments. >> thank you commissioner moran so at this point i'm going to ask that the general manager work with me and commissioner vietor to come up with some general outline related to specific topics i don't think there would be any disagreement related to our objectives related to renewables and wastewater management we talked briefly about the chemicals i think that's in the wheel house but obviously we have an option to add just keeping in mind there's only so much time we

are able to do it and we deliver that message to the environment commission and proceed from there are there any objections to that? >> i think to add to that even -- we do have a climate action plan i believe that's been adopted by the city so maybe it's the big take away is on how we're going to get to where we need to go. >> water conservation. >> how long is this meeting? >> 13 hours? [laughter] no. >> the conversation should take place in the public we should encourage everybody to attend if there's nothing further to add at this point i'll go ahead and call for public comment. commissioners are we okay? yes vice president king. >> i just wanted to backtrack to when we initially came up

with this idea there was something that prompted it and what was it? >> food waste. >> what? >> or financial -- yeah. >> okay and so this meeting was going to take place february? >> yeah. >> so it's a long time coming. it will be quick; it will be fine. >> is there any publicment comment? >> francisco, decosta please. >> thank you, sir let me state a few things. just like the san francisco public utilities commission is an enterprise department and you know you don't get the moneys from the general fund the department of the environment was created initially when the pg and e sold the power plant and with those moneys -- it was created

the department of the environment and now your commission also knows in the past your moneys moneys from the sfpuc had been used to fund the -- this is not clear in the public and we need to bring it out in the public. the department of the environment, when it had one of its directors jared broom field now the director of the epa regional 9 i believe if i'm not mistaken, he was instrumental in writing an ordinance called a precautionary principal which is not followed by this city so what is a precautionary principal state? generally it states that if our agencies or our engineers or our experts find that there's something

that will adversely impact any human life any life, we must stop and investigate and we we don't do that. whether it's in the release of the methane gas, whether it's in the release of pcp's whether it's in the release of so-called treated sewage in our streams so on and so forth so i say it's very nice to get 2 departments to sit down and chitchat but we need some substance like i belong to the public and it's very convenient to leave out the public -- because we have astute people in san francisco who can do any type of analysis and evaluation and build any type of platforms so that this government, this city government and state government

and federal government can go to a better place. so the department of the environment has been known for some political appointments. so we shouldn't leave that out just like on this commission there have been some political appointments for good but sometimes not for good. so that's not going to be discussed i know but just for you to reflect upon. but i would like the precautionary principal and other such things that the department of the environment has brought forth for our city to abide by and it be discussed thank you very much. >> thank you very much francisco i think commissioner vietor hit the nail on the head you do have a new department head and often times the members of the public and rate payers in particular get frustrated with the lack of

coordination so we owe it to everybody to discuss the policy issues and common ground that we have and see if there's partnerships moving forward but to have advocates come testify and start to sway the conversation i think it's a very unique relationship that this commission has with the commission on the environment and then obviously the talent that each department has begins to work together and we kind of flushed that out. i'm looking very much forward to it and between now and then certainly all ears. are there any other publicment comments on this item? seeing none this item is now closed. >> item 7 report to the general manager. >> good afternoon commissioners i first up wanted to give you an update on our water supply outlook so ellen will you come

up? >> thank you i'm ellen levine so we will run through the slides. for the water supply conditions all right so total reservoir storage we're 67 percent of maximum and 416 ,000 acre feet of that is available directly for drinking water and the water bank is working for us and i'll go into a little bit more detail when we get to the slide on that. and we received 2.85 inches at hetch

hetchy in april slightly below average for the month and with really limited run off because the conditions are really dry and the rain just just soaked right into the ground. i'll show you a plot that shows where our deliveries have been further in the presentation. >> i'm sorry where is this located. >> it's on your screen. >> i don't have a a screen. oh there it is thank you. do you have a hard copy available at some point? >> i don't have but we can get you one. >> can you mail me one? >> sure i'd be happy to. from the overview i just gave you from the last time steve gave a presentation hetch hetchy storage is up 14 percent so quite a bit of inflow over the

last month and down 12 percent that's because we've been debiting the water banks for total system storage we're down by about 1 percent that's taking in all of the inflow then all of the deliveries that we've been making in the last month if you take water bank out of the picture our storage is up 6 percent so a lot of debiting of water bank right now. this shows you where our precipitation is the blue line is 2007 and the red line this year and yellow or gold line is 1977 so you can see we're well above 1977 for precipitation for the year we had a very little bit of precipitation last week so you see just a little jagged bump up there. and really our rain season is towards the end we've got about

6 weeks left of the rainy season but snow pack conditions -- as you all know, we were significantly below the hundred percent median for april 1st we're now tracking well below 10 percent of april 1st conditions just to put that into relative terms today our snow pack is 22 percent of a typical may so we've had quite a bit of melt as demonstrated with our storages but if you look at where we're typically are in may we're at 22 percent of that. most of the snow is above our snow censors so we don't really have a good idea of how much snow is left but we're likely to see the melt by midjune of this year so the green line is tracking this year what you see with the black line is the target for

the 10 percent reduction that 10 percent reduction is based on reducing projected purchases for this year by 10 percent we asked our customers how much water they anticipated needing for the year the total with retail was 232 mgd so this line demonstrates what we envision a pattern of demand at 10 percent of the reduction of 232 which is 209 mgd for average annual and as you can see there's some weeks where we meet the target some weeks we do better than the target and some weeks when we're over the target it's really no mystery that if you track the rainfall that's generally when you get close to the target or below and we've got our challenge ahead of us in the dry season and make sure

we get the message out and customers start reducing their use. so to begin refilling water bank likely continue with these released into and through the summer our target storage level for cherry -- any of the releases we're making out of cherry are keeping that target storage in mind and hetch hetchy may fill by the end of the snow fill run off it may only be for a day but we may get there [laughter] on april on april 25th the governor released his second proclamation for this drought and there were a lot of directives to california to avoid wasting the water and these go directly to the individual water use age by not washing drive ways washing cars

at car washes that use recycled water and urging schools parks and golf courses and asking restaurants hotels and reduce water usage such as only serving water on request. and we also disclosed in the letter that we'll continue to review customer demands weekly. so in the event we're not meeting our targets and we feel we need to take further action we suggest examining that on june 15th and we encourage customers to implement the measures recommended by the governor we

sent a letter out to all of the wholesale customers with those water use reduction practices that i just showed you and our communications plan involves a campaign rolling out in june to really hit water use savings over the dry season we have our drought relief projects underway and the emergency aqueduct and the sunol valley water treatment plant and expanding our direct toilet replacement program and accelerating the san francisco ground water project. if there's any questions i'm happy to answer. >> commissioners? >> commissioner moran just a comment thank you for the presentation the good news is we're almost up to the level of 1977 precipitation but the bad

news is that 1977 was a record bad year so it's been good news and i'm glad you included the governor's drought statement he made it clear this is a statewide drought there's no agency that's untouched and most agencies now are really looking toward making sure if next year is dry it's not a really catastrophe if next year is a dry year we can have a significant shortfall so the message is it's still a severe drought and it's a statewide problem and problem. >> okay.

>> fifty bucks. thank you for being here. >> okay. so the next item is to give a sewer system improvement program update. >> water system. i'm sorry [laughter]. >> if it's the sewer system, you are in trouble. >> thank you. >> good afternoon commissioners dan wade this quarterly report -- as you can see in the slide both the regional and local at the end of the reporting period was approximately 84.7 complete overall and this percentage is with respect to the revisions

approved by this commission and as you know it's representing a a $125 million increase that would be 79 percent complete at the regional level and 95 percent complete of the local projects representing the 87.7 percent overall and the construction activities continue to to be the primary focus of the program with over 2.8 billion active construction in the program currently. construction has been completed on 63 of 83 projects and as of the end of march -- which is the end of the reporting period we had only 3 projects remaining in preconstruction and currently only 2 projects because one project the seismic

upgrades went to notice to proceed just a couple of weeks ago and as we reported in past meetings we're well past the peak of construction and however we do continue at over a hundred thousand personnel hours per month so there's still a significant amount of activity going on in the program and awarded construction contracts within the reporting period and as i just mentioned that project was actually noticed to proceed for construction on april 28th. we also awarded another contract for the system security integration. we completed the sfpuc east bay municipal utility district project and our safety record continues to be outstanding and again, i don't like to boast

about safety because we don't want to relax for a moment but it's noted that the safety record is outstanding on the program at less than half the industry average. we completed 186 out of 186 shut downs and a 10-year milestone a couple of weeks ago and that's a significant thing to celebrate. >> now if you look at the program cost trend, back a year ago we were still operating under the old wsip approved in 2013, 4.6 billion and as you know we rebaselined as you approved a couple of weeks ago at 4.765 billion and the new

budget takes into account all the major trends that existed in construction at that time and it also has appropriate contingency to account for the remaining program lists. and so if you look at the list this graph shows the confidence level versus the predicted risk cost impact and as you can see in this graph at this stage of the program we've requested enough contingency to cover approximately 65 percent of the remaining cumulative risk in the program or about $46 million in other words about 65 percent confidence that the remaining construction risk will be able to be covered with the remaining construction contingency that's been budgeted we think it's appropriate at this stage of the program because we don't want to over estimate the