. >> can you please call the roll? thank you. >> clerk: (roll call) we have a quorum. >> thank you for joining us today -- >> clerk: madam chair, i

apologize -- (feedback) due to the covid-19 health emergency and given public health recommendations issued by the san francisco department of public health and governor newsom and mayor breed, this meeting is held teleconference -- please be aware there's a brief time lag between the meeting and what is viewed on sfgtv. i want to thank staff for their assistance during the meeting. since this is a special meeting of the sfpuc, there will not be a public comment period. the public comment will be called for the item on the agenda by dialling 415-655-0001,

meeting id 187 655 2935, pound, pound. to raise your hand to speak, star 3. limit your comments to the topic of the agenda item being discussed and if you don't stay on the topic, the chair can interrupt and ask you to limit the comment. refrain from the use of profanity, address your remarks to the commission as a whole and not individual commissioners or staff. commissioner paulson is attending the meeting. thank you. >> thank you. today we're going to hold our special session on land management as you know, we have had three of these workshops and this is the fourth one. we will continuing our discussions around how we can sort of embrace the 21st century in the right way and how we're going to deal with the challenges that lie ahead and

we're partly way through the 21st century and almost 100% still depend on the model built and designed in the past century based on different climate conditions and different social and economic values. as we are grappling with the impacts of climate change, dryer and hotter climate, wildfires, flooding and also the aging infrastructure, population growth and environmental regulations, the question becomes how we're going to transition as a sector and utility. we want to change the equation that we used to manage our agency when it comes to water supply and demand. instead of demand growth, the

question is can we try to better understand -- sort of understand the demand dynamics and how we are changing the way we do things in this century. and these can be short term and long-term. over the past few decades as many of you know, the population of the region has doubled and our water use has not changed or actually reduced in some parts. and this is accomplished due to basically a lot of efforts around better plumbing and standards around -- standards and codes around plumbing and technological advancements we have seen over the past few decades. however, various climatic and social structures have impacted the water demand in so many ways. thinking about different droughts that come and go and changes the way we use water and

the current pandemic we are still trying to get ourselves out of has definitely changed the way we use water. another part of this whole demand story is how we are embracing new technologies such as recycling and reuse and other distributed water systems and how they are changing demand in a greater scale. and sort of thinking about the background i've asked our team at sfpuc and other parts to think around sort of look at demand projection and management and different things. what you will see in the next few presentations is going to focus not only on demand projection and management but also on what do we have right now as alternative water supplies in our system and how that is changing demand and where do we see ourselves 20-50

years from now. just to give you a sense, the way i see this is every system, every recycling project, every alternative water supply system is similar to solar on roof or on the corner of the street. in a way it is changing the way we use water. it is important as we are looking at social sort of population growth and economics, as a way of changing demand, look at how the alternative water supplies are chipping away from how we use water and impact demand. with that, i would like to invite our staff at sfpuc to walk you through the agenda, we'll have three presentation, one from our staff to talk about demand projections and management strategies and then move to team at the bay area

water supply and conservation agency to talk about what is going on in the peninsula and how the community is dealing with demand. and from there, nonprofit organizations to present their view of how the bay area is evolving. with that, i'll hand it off to staff to start the presentation from our staff. >> commissioner ajami, this is commissioner paulson. if i could just put an antidote in there. i'm going to have a time certain meeting, but i want to be clear, these are incredibly wonderful meetings and workshop we're doing. i want to not in any way change the agenda for today, but to just add on to what you were saying that it's not just the

supply and demand thing which you acknowledged, but it is also new things that are happening. and since our agency in particular spent so much time trying to figure out the best ways to accomplish things and especially regarding infrastructure, which i emphasized at our last particular meeting, i do want to say that, you know, as we go from -- this is like the simplest thing, we go from burning economy to a place with windmills, just the technology and what really is accomplishing energy needs needs to be talked about. that is a whole dynamic of what people are creating and maintaining and getting into the new technologies that we're dealing with, you know, with solar and the wind and all the other things that are on our

agenda. i do hope we do a piece somewhere that is going to acknowledge what is going to be happening and how it affects us in san francisco throughout northern california. thank you for acknowledging me on that. >> thank you. and i wanted to ask my fellow commissioners, if you have any questions along the way, i think we would like to make this as interactive as possible. feel free to ask questions as we are going through the presentations. >> i'll give an overview of the workshop. we've had three workshops on various topics so far and three more. this one will focus on demands

and demand management. the next one will focus on all of our alternative water supply planning process we're going through right now. and the third one will focus on our drought scenario and climate change and things we have to worry about in terms of water supply planning. this workshop today may not last the full three hours. there's plenty of stuff to talk about, but we may not fill the time entirely. certainly the last two i'm sure will take the full time if we have three hour sessions. but for today's workshop, we're going to focus first on our retail customers to be presented by sfpuc staff with demand projections both current and historic and then demand management measures. conservation and on site reuse programs. and a lot of that will be actually material you have seen

before with some additional emphasis on certain things. but that's really just to make sure that we're all on the same page relative to where we are at on the retail side. and then we'll turn it over to staff to present the wholesale customers, their demand projections, current, historic demands and water resource demands. those are two things. they have a total demand and only part of that, a large part in many cases, is water system demands and how their demand management efforts work in terms of conservation and how other supplies are considered. they would view various reuse programs as not something to reduce demand but reduce demand somewhere, maybe on our supply or another supply. these are important things to keep in mind. and then there's also time for

ngo's to provide comment as well, particularly tuolumne river trust. that's a brief overview for today. one thing we're required to do every five years and we need to get those particularly right for various reasons for compliance and in our case, the goal of the 2020 urban water management plan is to make sure the planning process for new developments through 2045 accounts for water supply demands and availability of management to support the new developments. want to make sure it is clear that the urban water management plan is not intended to be actual demands because the plan developments may or may not occur or may be delayed for a

variety of reasons. the whole urban water management plan process is developed back in the 80s when basically planning departments and water agencies were just on different paths and planning departments would assume the water agency would take care of it and the state realized that was not a sustainable path. there had to be an acknowledgement of what the plans were and was there water to meet those. the plan developments may or may not occur or may be delayed for a variety of reasons and economic conditions and droughts will affect demands in the future. those are much less predictable but now we can predict they will be happening and probably with a greater frequency as we have just seen within the last 30-40 years. the projections presented in the 2020 urban water management plan are closer to an outside envelope of what demands might be in 2045 rather than actual

demands. the urban water management plans go back to the 1980s but this just shows the period from 2000 through 2020. and you can see that overtime, the actual demands that have occurred have decreased overtime for a lot of different reasons. some of which have to do with drought, some of which have to do with recessions. and so, there have been changes and we have been trying our best each of the five year cycles to project demands with the best information available. but you can see clearly that the demand projections have come down as well as we have gotten i would say somewhat smarter about it. and then in 2015, we made a change in how we did demand projections using the modelling

to project the demands. but one of the things we did in the 2015 version was use input data that was representative of the whole service area because that's where we had data available. so you can see we actually overshot with the 2015 demand projections and so what you will hear later in the presentation is the current version utilizes a lot of san francisco retail information and so we think these are better projections that we have had than any other years. are they going to be accurate? again, because they are built around planning projections that come from the planning department, they are probably the outside level of demand that might need to be achieved.

this has changed overtime and we think we're in a good version now. next slide. this will be the subject of the next workshop and include the water supply projects still developing, the west side enhanced water recycle project and san francisco ground water project. they are changing as we speak. the west side project should start next year sometime. it may not be carried forward through construction because of the demands evolving. as i think the commission is

fully aware, the demands are evolving because one of the big demands is a large uncertainty, what the environmental obligations will be on the tuolumne river. and that is just one other demand we need to meet and that's part of the package of what we need to plan for. we certainly need to fully consider the urban water management plan projections but we also need to understand where current demand stands in relation to them as we move forward through the planning process for any future water

supplies. i'm going to turn it over to talk about demand projections and then the demand management efforts. and stop for a second, are there any questions from the commission or comments? >> good afternoon commissioners. i was the project manager for the urban water management plan and i'll talk about the plans we prepared for the 2020 plan update. next slide please. so i'm showing a reminder of the total projected water demands on the regional water system from wholesale and retail customers, they were included in the 2020 plan. for both customers, these are just demands on the regional water system after accounting for other supplies.

demand on the regional water system is currently almost 200 mgd and projected to rise to 236 by 2045. finance developed projections for water sales for current and recent trends in water sales and throughout. these projections do not include water loss. the urban water management plan projections on the other hand are based on san francisco planning department projections for housing and employment. they do not take into consideration demand impacts from events like drought or recession. these are fundamentally different projections used for different purposes. and for comparison, i have the

example of the projections for 2025. projected total water demand at 70.7 and this water demand includes 6 of water loss. if you remove the water loss, the difference between the projections is 9%. next slide. i'm going to talk about the methodology we used for the demand retail projections for the 2020 plan. as steve mentioned, one of the key points is the data underlining the new projections has been updated and improved since 2015. in 2015 it was based on water use data at the sector level of san francisco and customers. and data about temperature and rates for san francisco and wholesale customers were used to develop the model. in 2020, we developed a model

based only on san francisco-specific data and used 10 years of account level monthly billed water use data and data about temperature, precipitation and historical rates. next slide. it resulted in better per capita projections than in 2015 and the projected from the 2015 plan compared to the 2020 plan. in 2015, the green line shows the growth was projected to increase in 2020 and then decrease slightly. but in our 2020 projections in orange, the per capita demand is projected to decline steadily overtime. next. our retail demand projection methodology accounted for conservation and on site water reuse savings.

active conservation is saving from our conservation program and these were projected by the conservation model and subtracted from the demand projections. there's also savings from fixture replacement over time as efficiency improves, fixtures are replaced through a variety of mechanisms, upon resale of a house or trying to lower the water bill in response to increased rates. because some passive conservation is captured in the modelled response of water rate, we didn't subtract off savings. we also project savings from the on site water reuse program where systems are required for all new construction larger than 250,000 square feet. they are privately owned and operated and the projected savings is subtracted from the demand promgz projections.

what we observed through the demand model is that residential and commercial water use responds to changes in rates and temperatures. the responses here is what was observed from the 10 years of historical san francisco water use data. the model looks at how demand changes in response to a 10% change in the relevant variables. for water rates, if rates increase 10%, demand decreased 1.4 to 3% depending on the sector. if temperature increases by 10%, demand increases to 1.4%. these responses were observed in the historical data and used to project changes in future demands in response to changes in variables. next slide. and again, as steve mentioned, a key piece of information

underlining the projections is the anticipated growth in housing and employment in the city and this is provided to us by the san francisco planning department. so housing growth is assumed to all be in the multi family sector with no increase in single family homes. when we do the residential demand projections, they are built based on water use for housing unit and the forecast is used on employee water use per day and different by employment sectors such as office, retail and manufacturing. this slide summarizes our projected active conservation savings and on site water reuse savings. you can see on top, the projected demands before accounting for these factors and then the savings we projected for both active conservation and on site water reuse and the resulting final demand projections when the savings are

subtracted. the demand projections are projected to reach almost 81 mgd by 2145. next slide. so here we are summarizing the demand retail again but a little differently. this is broken up by in city and suburban retail and sectors within the city. as you can see, the biggest growth in the projections is in the multi family residential sector that is highlighted. and there's growth projected in the non residential sector from commercial growth. next slide. as i showed previously and as you can see here in the green line retail demands are projected to increase through 2045. this chart shows the projected population growth which again was provided by the planning department and although total demands are projected to

increase, our per capita demands are projected to decrease over this time period. that's true for both the residential per capita as well as for the growth per capita water use. the residential per capita demand decreases and plateaus for indoor and outdoor use, which is extremely low level. the growth per capita declines over the planning horizon reaching 64 gallons per capita per day. >> i have a quick question. i don't want to get too deep into it. if you go back one slide -- you know, where you break up single purchaser versus residential versus multi family. how do you define single family. is that like a physical address kind of thing or how do you know i'm living by myself in a studio

versus i have 52 kids living in a house? >> so a single family home would be defined as one unit versus multi family with multiple units in the same building. >> okay. it's that simple. okay, thanks. >> uh-huh. that's it for me and i'll pass it to julie unless you have more questions. >> i have a question. if you don't mind going back to the previous slide. just looking at your 2015 data, if -- i assume you have very similar slide for that time projecting to 2040, right? >> yes. >> okay. we don't have it here but if i did, why would i -- what was the number that we would have expected to see over the years.

at the time 43 going over the years? i'm trying to understand is 38 -- is it an arbitrary assumption based on the model process or is this -- can we even go lower than this. i'm trying to understand if there's a lower bounds to the 38. >> i would be happy to look at the previous figure and tell you. i don't believe it went down to 38. i think it maybe stayed in the low 40s in 2015. the way we do the demand projections is based on household water use. the 38 is a calculation from what the projections show is

going to be the residential sectors water use, kind of divided by the number of people we are assuming are living -- i would say this is what the model showed based on what we observed from previous 10 years. is this as low as we can go? maybe not. there may be additional conservation programs we implement to potentially lower the residential per capita. so i would say this is just kind of a snap shot in time and not necessarily representing the lowest we can go. >> the reason i ask that question, i think it's really important for us to have broader perspective on how low we can go. that's fine if 38 is the top, but it is important for the planning process to understand if there's a possibility to go lower than this and if that's the case, what does that mean for us as an agency.

thank you. >> i think there have been by folks overtime, some getting down to 35 and i think the world health organization has kind of an absolute floor that they have come up with about 10 years ago which was 25 for a developed area. but that -- that is an extremely low number. these would be kind of the average per capita use so we would have some people lower than these numbers and some higher than these numbers. >> of course. >> i have a question, too. on the slide before this one, and we've had this discussion before, i realize -- if you can remind us of the answer. on water loss, how active are we at doing something different and how do we stand in compared to others in terms of water loss?

>> we have an active program and we're always working to identify and fix leaks. i would say from the water loss team, the 6 is a conservative estimate of future water loss and we're always working to get the number lower. i do think that this is similar in terms of the percentage of our demands that we observe in water loss, similar to other utilities. >> yeah, actually we're on the low end of utilities in terms of water loss. others are higher. these run about -- a little less than 10%. the industry standard for a while has been about 15%. i think certainly in california, there's a bigger push to try to reduce water loss overall knowing that it is one of those things that you can take steps

to control and we've got various mechanisms we have been working on to try to make sure we can bring it down such as listening devices attached to fire hydrants and things like that, which have helped and we've got a whole set of folks devoted to working to bring the numbers down. >> do we have an idea of where the loss is for the most part? >> well, if we knew exactly where it was, we would go fix that. but it's actually ubiquitous throughout the system. >> so it's not fire hydrants, it's not leaky pipes in people's homes, it's basically every where. >> this is leaky pipes on our side of the meter, leaks on the other side are the responsibility of the customer. so we help them with that with the meter program so they can

get reports of excessive water use that way. yeah, these are different things that happen throughout the system. water breaks that occur, things of that nature. >> i have another question actually. what is the sort of position on metering individual houses within individual households within a multi family unit? are we thinking about it, do we think it matters or not? i'm curious about that. >> actually paula is with us, she might have a better answer. i know there's been talk of legislation at the state and city level here of what we call submetering, in multi family residential, finding a way to

meter those uses. one of the challenges about that, the devices you use are different things and when it comes to billing purposes, we're going to use our meters and so, that's always been a concern that those interior devices could be useful for comparing with each other but are not a good comparison with the meter. maybe julie has more to offer on this. >> i wanted to add that for new multi family buildings constructed after 2018, it is the law now and we do implement that locally and track that. for existing buildings as steve mentioned, it can be complicated. from a conservation standpoint, we focus on helping with all the other ways they could reduce water use because configuring all the plumbing and making all the other arrangements to add multi familiar submetering in the existing buildings could be

costly. >> and that's sort of the same thing globally about single family and multi family that has nothing to do with what was mentioned as the law, people are being legislatively proactive on this stuff. but it is three times higher -- well maybe two now and projected at three times higher. that said, how do we -- this is a lifestyle issue and work issue and like who are we as a city or community in terms of what we all do and that's based on needs. i guess sounds like you are on top of this stuff but probably knowing what that actually means moving forward is probably a little deeper metrics would be

helpful. >> one other point to add before the conservation program which is relative to this point. at the last commission meeting i said we were being asked to reduce demand in san francisco by 15% along with everybody else. that's a good example of well, you think you know what the numbers are going to be and then you get an exterm force that says we're going to cut by 15%. it's one of those things we all have to deal with. let's turn it over to julie to talk about the water conservation program. >> can i ask one more question before we move to julie's presentation. you know, the smart meters we have right now in place, are we using the data from those to bill individuals or are we still

sort of having dual system that we have monthly bill and we are sort of monitoring the 15 minutes by 15 minutes data collection. i have seen some agencies are not necessarily using the smart meter data actively. >> we are. those meters are -- they're reading our meters, they produce hourly data that are then transmitted every four hours and we use it for a lot of purposes and maybe julie can elaborate on that in the water conservation area. we do track that and notify people of potential leaks and things like that. in addition to using it as billing data and we went back when we first put it into place, we went from bimonthly to monthly billing.

>> good afternoon commissioners. happy friday everybody. i'm going to provide a brief overview of some points about the retail conservation program and planning process and i did present on this topic at the april 13th commission meeting. so like steve said, some of this may be familiar but thought it would be useful to do a recap and additional points. we have had a comprehensive retail program since the 90s. we run it rain or shine. we can ramp up during drought times. we have updated over the years to reflect new data and technologies and new requirements. and our program includes a mix of incentives, assistance, tools, education and mandates. and we base our program on best management practices in the field of conservation as well as studies and research and we draw on our own expertise of what works best in our service area.

it is really data and feasibility that drives our decisions and not budget. i do want to put the caveat, that doesn't mean we don't carefully estimate and monitor our budget. next slide please. so we have an organized process for how we update the conservation program. we regularly evaluate and update it to incorporate factors reflected in this graphic for example, changes in fixture saturation, new codes and regulations, how many customers have participated in our program to date, customer water use characteristics and developments in new technologies like the automated data. we use a customized conservation model to estimate water savings and we model the cost and plumbing fixture efficiency rates. so we monitor and adjust the

conservation program every year and then every five years we do a deeper dive and evaluate and summarize our fundings in a conservation plan. our most recent plan is the 2020 plan, available for public review on our website. next slide please. so, since 2005 when we developed our first conservation potential study and model, we have evaluated over 80 measures and mandates and implemented many of these. we currently run more than 20 active programs. and as this graphic shows, we have a process for reviewing measures and determining which to implement that make most sense for us, for our local conditions and opportunities. some of the key criteria we look at, water savings, is there a market for the measure, is it feasible and will customers be interested in it.

so, toilets, close washers, shower heads really drive indoor water use and our core conservation measures over the years have really been focused on replacing water wasting fixtures and have helped along with more funding codes to greatly reduce the populations of inefficient fixtures. the graph on this slide shows the trend is going to continue over the next 20 years, at which time we anticipate having very few inefficient fixtures remaining. for example, the graph on the top of the toilet shows that about 18-19% of the 2020 population of toilets in single family and multi family buildings are inefficient. that's a very low percentage. that's where we are now. by 2045 it is going to drop to

5%, practically zero. next slide please. >> i have a question for you on the previous slide. you know, the 11% oven the toilets for commercial industrial and institutional customers, how much -- what does that translate into when you think about water use compared to single and multi family. we're talking about a lot more water, right? or maybe not. >> collectively, there are more toilets in the residential sector. i don't have the estimate in front of me what the difference would be for 11% of commercial sector toilets and 5% remaining. that's certainly something we can look at and report back to you on. >> go to now, not only

percentage wise but also the amount of savings that we are gaining through this. and what does that 11% translate to. >> just to give you a rough idea, in san francisco residential water use is about two thirds of water sales and commercial and industrial is about one third of water sales. on the gross level, that's how it divides between the sectors. this would be within those sectors but as julie says, we can generate data on these and be more explicit about what they actually mean. >> one other question i have is on the close washers for the commercial industrial buildings. i mean, i still pass by a lot of laundromats that have old washers and dryers in them. are those fitting in this

category? >> we have programs of coin operated machines and we have been working with laundromats for years and years. many have taken advantage of rebate programs and changed them out. it's a great bottom line savings for a laundromat to do that. water is their main product. we continue to work with them but this is reflecting the residential data. if you look in our conservation plan, we do have very detailed study of our fixture efficiency modelling and we have data on the commercial clothes washers there. >> the gray line on the clothes washer is still -- >> yes, that is coin operated,

yes. >> most of our estimated water savings are driven by replacement of water wasting fixtures and equipment and retrofitted large landscapes and on site reuse in buildings. that doesn't mean there's not other valuable measures we offer. for example, public education, outreach to customers, water rise evaluations and others are very important measures and they have great customer assistance value. another point, the most precise estimate of savings and program

offerings is really over the next five years and beyond this, we have less certainty regarding how will technology change, how many customers are going to participate in what we offer. what changes in codes and regulations may happen. next slide please. our program has provided extensive water savings for customers, this is just the last 10 years and showing by the categories i mentioned. in our current program, it is going to continue to build on these accomplishments over the next five plus years. next slide please. on site reuse is a very important conservation measure. our on site reuse program includes a city ordinance that

requires on site systems for toilet flushing and we provide grants for funding, voluntary projects to install on site systems and as sarah noted, the savings estimated is folded into the demand projections and reflected in our conservation plan. next slide please. so i'm going to end on a high note. it's also a repeat but i think it can't be said too often that our conservation program has and projected to continue to contribute to significant water use decline, even with population growth. since 2005, per person daily water use has declined 30% and population increased 15% and our current estimated residential per capita water use is about 42 gallons and as sarah noted, projected to decline to 38 by 2025. to put it in perspective, this is among the state's lowest

residential per capita water use and reflects both indoor and outdoor use and just to touch on one of the points that was brought up during sarah's presentation, the state is currently setting standards for indoor residential water use and the lowest they are projecting that to go by the year 2030 is 42 indoor. just putting ours in perspective. our current 42 is indoor and outdoor and projected to go down to 38. we're very low and well within what the state is currently looking at in terms of where it's going. so, i think next slide -- that's my last slide and i was going to turn it over now to questions or back to steve to move to the next segment.

>> we've had an active conservation program for many years and it will continue and we'll continue to see strong results from that. >> i think states should look at the numbers and reconsider the way they're setting indoor water use standards. the indoor water use doesn't matter where we are in san francisco or l.a. it's indoor water use. what makes us different is our outdoor practices -- outdoor water use practices. i think we should bring that up as we engage with the state. i'm part of one of the -- a few of the working groups that are involved in the process and it's very, very hard to kind of push this as a way of thinking and i think we actually as an agency, we have to -- we have taken

leadership in this and should participate more actively to make sure the standards are set properly. >> it's all stuff going out. you know when people do legislative stuff based on new building, that's one thing and then i know that everybody has been working hard for years on incentives for washers and shower heads and new toilets and

all that other kind of stuff. think it has to be pointed out still noted that still, it's not the big buildings per se. it's the residential use that maybe is the sticky one. >> now over to the wholesale side. >> i think -- the ceo of bay area water supply and conservation agency. i don't know -- thank you so much. nicole, please take it away. >> great. thank you very much chair ajami and commissioners. i'm pleased to be here today. i apologize my video is not showing, my wi-fi is not stable enough for it. i'm pleased to speak to you today about the water demand and

supply projections with member agencies for the region. next slide please. the first projections supported water assistance program in 2004 and that really was a monumental shift in how the region did demand projections in which they were completely coordinated and ensured kind of parallelism along the lines if you will. with each subsequent round of

projections, we have now done four, we have made improvements in each iteration. early on we realized we needed to do a better job of collecting the data that informs demand projections. we heard staff talk about data you have in san francisco. we recognized this in 2004 in fact. we have an aggressive program to collect necessary data to support demand projections. we do our projections at an individual agency level and then those are rolled up into regional projections. we have projection for total water demand and then a projection for water conservation savings. in doing those projections for savings, the agencies identified the water conservation plans and use them to identify what the agencies project to purchase from san francisco, how will they meet that projected demand. that's a different number than the supply guarantee from you.

it is literally what they anticipate to buy from you or at least their current plan and projected use of other supplies to meet the overall projected demand. i'll go into that in some detail. our most recent projections were completed in june 2020. next slide please. so, demand projections actually use a single comprehensive method for projecting the demands and then that single method is actually customized for each agency based on local characteristics. so like you heard from your own staff, our projections are using what is called end use or bottom-up approach. considering, again, within each of the -- we actually have 28 models, for each of the different service areas, consider the building age, the fixture efficiencies in the buildings, the change-outs or

upgrades overtime based upon ordinances and plumbing code standards and things like that, it accounts for the differences between customer classes and also accounts for the land use types, existing and shifts in development patterns, including things like density. we use it for certain aspects of demand projections, including the near term. like the first five years post drought water use rebound. when we did the 2020, we knew we were in a rebound. and for things like addressing climate change and the impact on local water use. we rely on locally approved development and land use plans and we incorporate in the most recent versions, region specific climate change scenarios for the effect on future demands and account for efficient water use

technology and conservation programs that each agency commits to implement. in 2020, two important things, we also examined multiple scenarios and a range of possible demands to identify uncertainty. the scenarios were do we rebound like we have in the past, do we rebound more or less? is climate change more or less than what we were expecting? kind of examining the scenarios to kind of figure out what their impact is on them. also new in 2020, we added in a stakeholder work group that we engaged in discussion of our conservation measure selection and how we analyzed different conservation measures. next slide please. so the forecasting method that we use, i kind of like to think of it as three layers. as we build to the overall

demand forecast. first, we look at the historical analysis, that's the first layer. that uses the data that we have back to 1995. this is water use data by customer class, billing data for all of the agencies, conservation information, all those types of things. we have a fairly substantial water conservation data base is what we call it. it relied upon all of the data and did an analysis of that data to determine what are the significant variables in history, right? going back, what were the significant variables that impacted demand? and the idea is trying to use that to determine the impact of drought. this analysis of historical data really provides some helpful information. to answer questions like, how much and at what rate will demand rebound as the economy

expands. how much will future price increases continue to depress demand and how does demand respond to weather. kind of took advantage of all of this knowledge we had and rolled it into our second layer, which was our short-term five year future which we call the drought recovery. and here, the historical data was used to inform what we projected to be the customer response in the near term, to things like drought and economic recovery. and then for each agency, the past data on economic and drought recovery were used to inform individual projections. there was no single use of data. we used everybody's individual data about how their service areas respond in the past. in each case, the data and analysis show there is a permanent amount of demand reduction from past droughts. we do not fully recover. (please stand by...)

. >>--to really understand how they're responding and how they're using water. we analyze that data again, like i said, and then add on top of that, again, within these customer categories the long-term projection to come up with projected demand. all of this stays at basically a water use within that category, and then within that, we're able to come up with forecast by customer category. you can slice it and dice it several ways, but it ends up being a very detailed projection at the account level. next slide, please. -- whether economy, the service area data, which is rates and population area and conservation. for each of those, there was a specified data source, and i will call out one in particular for population. we do rely on abag projections or other adopted land use plans. some of our agencies will adopt their land use plans after the abag projections, so we will use whichever ones the agencies feel is most reflective of what's going on in their service area. next slide, please. as we do our demand projections, we incorporate the savings from past and projected savings activities. bosca has had a program since 2001. actually, with the predecessor agency, bowa. bosca and its customers have invested $14.3 million in water conservation. it's resulted in 146,000 conservation related actions, so i kind of think of it as touches to the customers, things like rebates, audits, kicks to classes, school children. today, bosca implements 20 programs in the region. we imp willment programs region wide. those are our core conservation programs, and also on a subscription basis that are also available to agencies to participate at their decision. and this ensures that we have coordinating conservation programs in the region, things like that. for the 2020 demand study, our agency selects new conservation programs to implement 23 measures in the model. so there were measures for each customer class: residential, customer, irrigation, system water losses, and education. using what we know about each individual agency's level, we

were able to analyze the cost, the projects savings, the market potential, and the overall cost effectiveness, and then, the savings for existing and planned saves were accounted for in the projections along with the savings from passive conservation or the savings that come from programs that are implemented, things like ordinances and stuff like that. next slide. so shifting to our results, this graph shows population. just let me orient you a little bit because i've got several of these. population is along the axis and millions of people, and our time scale is 1985 to 2045. the solid lines with historic numbers -- are historic numbers, and the dotted lines are projections. so what our 2020 study has shown that the bosca study region is expected to increase 27% to 2.1 million people by 2045. to do a projection out to our previous comparison, 2040, the population projections are now 8% greater than the previous projections. next slide. so to look at demand, and demand is now our axis on the left-hand side in millions of gallons per day, the gray bars are the drought years, just to put them in there because i think it's important when we start looking at demand. this graph showed our projected demand, so that's the projected demand of 296. then if we layer on passive conservation, we get a reduction of 31 m.g.d. we've moved out an extra five years and demand is still 4% less with this projection, so as you can see the slope the curve, we've significantly reduced the slope of the curve, and also, you're seeing in that near term where the gap is between the solid line and the dotted line kind of this five-year picture where we could this econometric analysis where we don't just start at the high point in the prior demand, which is what you saw in the first version. next slide. so if we put this all together, we've got demand on our axis on

our left shown in blue, but population in axis on the right shown in orange. from 1986 to 2045, the projected population in the region is expected to increase 76%, while demand is projected to decrease 1%; essentially staying flat. what we're seeing is the change in the key variables, and it's really changed the trajectory of our demand moving forward. next slide. >> sorry, nicolle. can you actually just stay on this slide? i have a question for you. >> absolutely. >> go ahead. i think you were getting to that later. i'll let you finish. >> no worries. next slide, please, lee. >> so as i mentioned, we do our

projected readings by population. this is a calculated result, not an inputted result, and i'm showing per capita demand is our access on the left. the top line is gross per capita, which is, you know, all water use in the region divided by population, so it includes residential and nonresidential as well as losses, and then, the bottom line is residential per capita. and you'll see, and this is where it's really interesting. you see the impact of the droughts on that -- that per capita number, and you see it really dipping down hard, and then, there's also before the -- you know, you've got the recession impacts in there, as

well. but our projections are now showing that our residential per capita is projected to be 56 gallons per capita per day in 2045, which is actually the lowest recorded use per capita for the region, which i find that a very interesting result. the gross per capita also continues to decline over time, although it doesn't achieve the level that was achieved during the last drought. i don't actually have any answers for why that is, so part of that has to do with the impact of dedicated irrigation and where nonresidential customers and irrigation customers really reduced their use during that drought, but that's just kind of my guess of what's going on in that particular situation. next slide. >> i have a quick question. this is commissioner paulson.

>> yes. >> and one of them is kind of a talking points question, and the second one -- and i'll start with that -- i did have to leave early, as i said at the front end, and i hope that all the stacks are going to be send, you know, for all three parts of this workshop will be sent to all the commissioners. that being said, what is -- i don't need to know the names or whatever else because i have looked them up before, but how many agencies are in bosca, just global number. >> 26. all of san mateo county, eight agencies in santa clara, and two in alameda county. >> great. that's all i need to know. i'm going to have to leave in a couple of minutes, but i hope i get all the stacks, including the next community from community and nonprofit

leaders, also, so thank you, commissioner ajami. >> all right. lee, let's go to the next slide then. >> i have a question on that slide first. >> oh, absolutely, yeah. >> so we're looking at 56 gallons per day per capita, and in san francisco, we're looking at 38. and i realize that many of your customers have a whole lot more outside water use than they do in san francisco, but do you have, like, more urbanized areas that you're serving that they get to break out, whether they get closer to the 40, and it's just really closer to the properties that are up to maybe a 70 or 80? do you have a breakdown like that? >> we actually, in the demand study -- actually, this is broken out by agencies -- so the answer is yes. this is the average across the region. absolutely, their agencies well below -- there are agencies

well below 56. as you can imagine, it incorporates -- there are acreages that are also irrigated acreages, so we have a range in that per capita use, and that use is available in our demand study, and that is available on our website. i'm sorry; i didn't -- i just spoke to regional issues. >> that's okay. that's great, nicolle. >> since we're asking questions, i'm going to ask you the question i had for you earlier. you're talking about changes over time and population growth. i was just doing the back calculation, the population growth between 85 and 2015 was about 30%, right? your population grew 30%. your demands has gone down, you know, over time even to the population has grown, but what

i see is still, whenever you're looking ahead on the projections, you're still sort of correlating population with demand growth, which has not happened in the past. and my question is, are we going to be having more of these droughts? we got out of one a couple of years ago. we're going into one again. this year, i think is the hottest and driest year in the history, so it makes me wonder if we're going to have more regular dry cells and extreme droughts. wouldn't that work as these stressors or hammers that bring down your demand again and again and again? maybe not in the same magnitude but actually might change the patterns in different ways because i don't see that in the

future projections. and then, you were talking about your demand forecast, saying you mentioned you guys are incorporating some form of, you know, uncertainty into your projections based on, you know, future climates, future possible economic impacts or next pandemic, hopefully not for a long, long time. >> so you're right. so we looked at that when we did the 2020 projections. -- 1985 projections, and again, if you go back 24 months from when we finished that, we ended up selecting a middle of the road kind of the normal saying normal weather, normal economy,

and prior rebound reflects upcoming rebound. that was the decision to be made at the time. clearly, that's -- that's a -- that's a significant question now, and we are planning a refresh, and i have some slides at the end of the presentation to talk about that, so that might be helpful for me to hit on that. but you're absolutely right. this is assuming a normal status quo, you know, and as the last five years have indicated to us, unfortunately, you know, i don't know what status quo is now. the question is, how do we deal with that? i appreciate your thoughts on it, absolutely. okay. lee, let's go to the next slide, and it's just a few more ahead. so one of the things steve mentioned, and it's really important is that, you know,

the bosca agencies, we project demand, but they also need to project, you know, how are they going to meet that demand? the regional water systems, as a supply generally [inaudible] but the bosca agencies also have local supplies that they invest in, and we're seeing a trend to change that moving forward with reflecting increased investments in local supplies. so what this graph shows you, we've got supplies stacked up in m.g.d.s in five-year increments projected out from 1985 to 2045. they're rolled up, and this information is available in our annual survey, and what you see

as we move forward is for san francisco to move forward for the agencies, but it will become a smaller percentage of the overall supplies developed, you know, provided to their customers, going from 65% to 61%. a greater volume, but not reaching the 184 m.g.d. supply gap. these are the imports for the state project and the purchases from valley water for those agencies. increased use of groundwater, maintenance of existing surface water, and then increasing investments in additional

conservation. the next slide, so let's look at that a little bit more closely. on the left, it's kind of a current snapshot from fiscal year 19-20. on the right is the 2045 snapshot, and you'll see where the p.u.c. purchases, again, are kind of this bedrock component. obviously, 2019 was a lower water demand year, so all the supplies are smaller, but you do see a commitment to an increased use of alternative supplies. in fact, the use of other supplies increases from a total of 66 million gallons per day in fiscal year 19-20 to 102 million gallons per day in 2045, so nearly double, so agencies are making choices to invest in alternative supplies while they're keeping their p.u.c. purchases, you know, lower. we also see that doubling in recycled water and an increased

use in groundwater. so as i mentioned, we did complete our demand study in june 2020, and that was after 18 months of work. if you can imagine what it takes to do 28 different models, it's quite a task. and -- but one of the things that became clear to us as this study was coming out, we had covid. that had shown up on the radar. the demand had continued, there had been this continuing impact of the demand or the drought. it was clear that we needed to do a refresh and an update of our 2020 demand study because of things like that covid. the state efficiency guidelines that we had anticipated to be

out before we completed this, you know, those are not out yet. your climate change study results, and also to reflect the agencies' water management plans, if they'd adopted more conservation supplies, we want to roll that into our effort. so this is a study that we've begun already. the plan is it will incorporate a sensitivity analysis to better understand how different assumptions for key variables impact projections, and at this point, the plan is to create an impact demand to create different scenarios, and this is going to allow the agencies but also bosca to adjust our water resource does planning efforts.

we -- next slide, please.

>> as we were in the process of developing our 08 demand study, that was when the great recession kind of had begun and was, you know, in full swing. and economic downturns are difficult, maybe, i don't know,

if not impossible to predict. it's clear that that's something to look at. and also, now, we have the pandemic, and we know we've had a job impact in 2020, continues to have a job impact, and who's it going to be the impact -- and what's it going to be moving forward. next slide, please. you know, as you look at the chart on the right, it does seem that the drought has had the greatest impact on the accuracy the norm projections. our customers respond when we ask them to ration because of drought. it's one of the most phenomenal assets we have because they are so responsive, and that's evident when you look at it. the question is how do we incorporate unknown future droughts and the effect that they have on our drought into our demand projections, right?

i don't know that i have an answer for you, but these are the questions as we kind of think our way through this. next slide. conservation, you know, the droughts have spurred a massive amount of conservation activities at the state level that are unprecedented, following -- as we had the drought in 07 and 08 and then the drought in 15-16, we had requiremented at the state level that were like nothing that they'd seen before in requiring efficiency, so not plumbing code fixtures, not new building fixtures, it's you must get to a certain level of efficiency that we never anticipated. they'd been amazing at making a difference in our use, but hard

to anticipate when they're going to show up, but obviously has an impact on our demand. the other thing is, especially in the last droubt, we have seen an explosion of new technology both on the conservation potential, also on the treatment potential, you know, this idea of on-site reuse or other types of activities to do when it's on your property; things that we never had anticipated before that. so amazing. how do we figure out how to reflect that in our projections is the question? and our conservation programs have responded. we have more conservation programs than anticipated at this point, and those are all incorporated into our study. next slide, please. you know, as i mentioned, our 2020 demand study did consider several rebound scenarios, and we selected one, based on past

experience. the complicating factor now is what you're seeing, and this is impactly what you brought up, chair ajami, is that new droughts are beginning before we figured out what happened at the end of the last drought, so what does that mean moving forward? what is the long-term impact of that on demand? that's something we're going to have to figure out because it does seem that this is a new normal for us. we can't assume that having a drought every 20 years is the way it's going to be, unfortunately. next slide, please. lastly, we did incorporate directly in our demand study the use of historic customer response to water rate increases to project the future impact on demand. your rates have significantly increased as a result of wsip,

and all those things, and that's an important piece that has to be incorporated into this as we move forward. next slide. so given all that, we're going to consider various scenarios of population, climate change, employment, and drought rebound. those seem to be kind of the four key ones at least, at least at this point. i expect additional factors will be considered with stakeholders coupled with the experience of our model consultants. the results of this sensitivity analysis will include the baseline forecast because unfortunately we do have to come up with a single line for our water demands and such, but also, the high boundaries of

the demand creating this envelope, and the sensitivity in the forecast model for each envelope will be determined, and these are going to be useful to assist us in tracking more usefully how water behaves. and rather than waiting and doing it every five years, this is going to be something that's going to be built into a more regular review as -- as we have this changing dynamic going on in the service area. next slide. so bawsca's member agencies are planning for a future. our objective is to make sure that a high quality supply of water is available when and where people need it for businesses and community agencies in the bawsca service area. our agencies are committed to demand management with conservation, reduction of

water losses, water reuse, and other activities, investing in recycled water, groundwater, and other supplies, and also developing efforts to developing your own water supplies so you can meet your obligations to them. one thing that's not on this, as well, is we're also committed to the value of data to inform our planning. you know, as i was putting this together, the fact that we had -- i forgot that we had data back to 1995. that is a role that bawsca has played since before it began. we know there's things going on with ordinances. we know that agencies have that information, but we don't collect that, so what's the next big piece of data that we

want to collect and form that's also going to be part of our data? we last completed in 2015. my expectation is that this update will reflect a one-water approach. that is appropriate. it's going to be a challenge to figure out what that means in, you know, three counties and how to deal with that, but up to that challenge, i'm excited to engage in that conversation. it's also -- we also plan to include a stakeholder roundtable throughout the process to identify opportunities and interests, and the thinking is this will support your actions to implement your own water supply program. next slide. so just in closing, all of the data and documents can be found on our website. we work hard to document or

data so that it's available with others. with that, that concludes my remarks, and i'd be pleased to answer any questions you have. >> thank you so much. any questions, colleagues? go ahead. >> not so much a question, but just a comment. i think if you look back, i don't know, 20 years, you can correct me if i am wrong, nicolle, but i think when we asked the wholesale customers what their water projections were, a lot of them said a minimum guarantee, five gallons, we're going with that. so they didn't really pay attention to all this. they almost had a sense of if we project less than what we're guaranteed, you might take it away from us. the projections, they're never going to be active, but the projections that bawsca has gone through to get this data.

virtually every agency within bawsca is projecting less use than the minimum guarantee, and that's a rerefreshing kind of helpful way of doing this -- very refreshing kind of helpful way of doing this, so i just want to congratulate them, and thanks for the work. >> thank you very much, commissioner, and you're right. i think if you go back to before that very beginning with that first demand projection, if you go back to 2000, that is exactly how they were doing it, right? so we have seen these improvements, and i think they're very important, and everybody respects that. [inaudible]. >> thank you. nicolle, one of the -- i guess the thing that stands out to me in the presentation is maybe the greatest surprise to me on that was the tracking that you did of your population projections and how they have tracked pretty closely, and that is different than our own experience, which then puts the focus on, you know, if you're

trying to really nail your demand projections, then the per capita use becomes the big thing, and you're saying that that was the area that's been responsible for past errors in demand projection. i didn't see it explicitly, and i may be missing something, but when you talk about the refresh that you're going to be doing this year, where is the per capita usage within that refresh? >> so as i mentioned, the per capita use is actually a calculated result, so the refresh will go back into the assumptions that build the demand projections, and that sensitivity on the assumptions for those key factors. the questions that how do we deal with the drought rebound, and how do we deal with multiple drought rebounds, and

how do we modify our -- you know, how do we consider what's the impact from the changing economy, and how do we deal with that? so it's going -- and when you modify those assumptions, it changes the total demand in a customer category, which then rolls up to the total demand, and then, you calculate this whole thing per capita. so it is a sequential thing, but it's assumptions that, in one way, i've been thinking about it is that, you know, we're doing our best to project forward, and we're projecting kind of a normal -- everything is normal, everything is average, and -- and in some respects, you say, well, that's the best thing you could do. but obviously, as we look to the future, we know that

average is not what's happening. we're seeing extremes, we're seeing multiple events stack up on each other, so we have to figure out how we adjust, and when we modify those assumptions on each of those key factors, what happens to our demand? maybe it changes a lot, maybe it doesn't. i don't know what that answer is, and then, the other thing will be is even if the demand changes, the p.u.c. purchases that the agencies are projecting may not change. that's definitely not a 1:1 correlation, so that'll be the other piece of the puzzle. >> okay. thank you. >> thank you so much, nicolle. i just want to also thank you for this comprehensive presentation. it is very informative, and i appreciate that. first, i want to acknowledge what my colleague, commissioner

harrington said. i think it's great to see how much progress we have made over time in the way we approach demand, but i also want to say i really appreciate how you're sort of stepping back and looking at this into a more sort of constructive way to make sure we better understand how and where things are changing and what's impacting the patterns, and i -- i -- i think i want to say i'm looking forward to what your new efforts is going to bring about and what insights we are going to learn from that, and so thank you. >> my pleasure, and i look forward to presenting it and sharing it as it becomes available. >> yeah. >> if i could contribute one further bite partly in response to commissioner harrington's

question early on, during the last drought, 2014-15, we were tracking regularly, and the state was tracking residential per capita use by water agency, and we routinely looked at what were the lowest 15 per capita residential use areas in the bay area, and 12 of those 15 were san francisco, and 11 of our wholesale customers, including east palo alto, daly city, hayward, and i can't just recall, but the number of agencies that were in the lower end was very significant, and actually going forward now because of the way the state will be tracking usage in the current drought, we'll be seeing a lot of those numbers again during the upcoming months, maybe even year -- or hopefully not years, but we will be seeing routinely how

people are doing on a per capita basis, and so that will be informative, as well. >> thanks, pete. >> one last question that i wanted to ask is the new development that comes on-line is very, very different to what was built before. in my other role at stanford, we have sort of tracked these, and what you see is the new development is much more efficient. actually, some of them use a lot less than some of the other water users in the system, including multifamily units in a low-income area that often are low water users. so i think it's important to look at where water per capita use goes, that it's important to look at water development as

a new trend. one thing when i talk to colleagues is i say we're building future cities now. so we better change the way we build these communities or develop our cities or change the way we use water, and that's one thing that we need to incorporate in our demand forecasting process because that change is coming, and if we are not anticipating, we can catch ourselves in the wrong place. okay. with that, i would like to invite our colleagues -- i think peter drekmeier is going to lead the presentation by the n.g.o. peter is the director of water policy with the tuolomne water trust, and he would be presenting. peter, are you there? okay. perfect. take it away. >> okay.

well, thank you very much, chair ajami and commissioners and others. can everyone hear me okay? >> yes. >> well, thank you for allowing me the opportunity to present. next slide, please. i want to start off with this quote from john fleck. water managers incentives safe erring on the side of caution. the consequences are far greater having not enough water than having too much water. i think we all know that it's the primary goal of a water agency is to have enough water, and that you don't run out. i also want to point out that there are consequences of holding back more water than is

necessary in the reservoirs during dryer periods and then having to spill it in the end. we've talked about this before, really big impact on the tuolomne river. could i get an advance click, please? so at the time fleck was booked, they were looking at ways to get more water to las vegas. at the time, they were looking at piping in groundwater from eastern nevada. next slide, please. last year, the authority shelved the project, realizing they weren't going to need as much water as they thought, and it's opening up enormous opportunities for sustainable water management in the west.

bawsca and the sfpuc have done a great job in water conservation, and i think we should celebrate that and continue that success moving forward. next slide. so you've seen this before. this is from the pacific institute, and could i get an advance click, please? basically showing what we've heard about already in the workshop that, per capita, water demand has increased faster than the population has grown. so for example, the sfpuc territory, population grew by 8%. per capita demand decreased by 30%, and overall demand decreased by 25%. great success story. next slide. and we've seen just recently how demands -- demand projections affect water supply and potential rationing.

so prior to the urban water management plan, the sales cap was going to be used. the contractual obligations in a manner that represented demand starting now and going out to 2065, the 265 demand there. next slide. okay. great. but that was changed. a switch was made to use actual demand projections with the bottom of this slide. current actual being 148, and the bottom being 246. next slide. but with those original numbers, the sales cap, it was projected that in year three of a drought, only 45% of supply would be available, which means there would have to be 55% rationing. next slide. but by using the demand projections, the water available climbed to 60%, and therefore, rationing declined

from 55% to 40%. that's a pretty big change. next slide. so we looked at the previous four urban water management plans and compared them to the actual, and on average, the plans were off by 22%. that's a pretty big number, but depending on how you look at it, it could be a lot bigger. for example, in 2015, the projection for the next five years that demand was going to increase by 38 million gallons per day, but the actual was 5 million gallons per day. so the projection was 760% higher than the actual, and that was just in the last urban water management plan. next slide. this is -- overprojections go back a long time. this is an image from 1993, and

you can see those lines there at the top were different demand projections, climbing up into the demand of 450 million gallons per day. can i get one more click, please? so i overlaid the recent demand, so demand ended up being about half of what was projected. and the thing here is the system was designed for much higher demand, in the range of 300, 350, 400 million gallons per day. so the fact that the demand is so low, that's the opportunity. water that we thought would be needed for human uses now can be left in the river for the environment, and we're perfectly situated for that. the reservoirs that the sfpuc owns or has a water bank in can

hold enough water to last six years. that gives you enough flexible to have one, two, three, four, five dry years, and then, you have an average year, and things start to fill up quickly. next slide. but where i think the urban water management plan is way off is with the population growth projections. so it looks back in the next 15 years, and the population of san francisco grew by about 118,000 people. that was pretty rapid growth for san francisco. next slide. but the projection for the next 15 years is almost twice that, 228,000. so we had pretty rapid growth,

which is highly unlikely. next slide. now, traditionally, the department of finance is the standard for population growth projection, and you see the urban water management plan is planning for growth of 25% in san francisco, and the california department of finance is projecting about a quarter of that. could i get an advance click and then a second advance click? and if you were to use department of finance numbers, that would reduce the projected water use by 10 m.g.d. that's really significant. population plays a huge role. next slide. and could i get two clicks,

please? thank you. i would call this more of a road map for the future. the driver is to reduce per capita emissions from vehicles, and so a big piece of that is to address the jobs housing and balance so people can live closer to their jobs, but it's really trying to enable the jobs growth, the sacred jobs growth in the bay area with the projection of 1 million more jobs, so that brings in a lot more people that are going to need housing, so a lot of

housing in this plan, and the projection is that we will add 2.5 million people to the bay area by 2050. and i live in palo alto. there's going to be opposition to this type of growth. next slide, please. and in fact, even in san francisco, which is more tolerant of development, and the survey that we commissioned in 2019, we said plan is projecting this much growth in jobs, this much growth in population. do you think this will improve or worsen your quality of life, and of those who had an opinion, 85% said it will worsen their quality of life. so people get it. when you add a lot of jobs,

which is the demand side of the jobs-housing imbalance, and you don't keep up with the housing, which is pretty tough to permit in some of these areas, traffic gets worse and projections get worse. we talked about this a little bit at the last workshop, the connection between rates, water rates, and demand, and you heard earlier for a 10% increase in price, we can expect a 1.4 to 3% decrease in demand. next slide. so for the bawsca territory, the wholesale customers, we're expecting a 33% increase in water rates in the next three

years. now those bars on the right are smaller than the ones on the left, but you have to keep in mind that they're building on the current price, which includes all of those increases on the left, so this is a pretty significant increase in the cost of water, and that's going to send a really strong pricing war. next slide, please. and in san francisco, the combined water and wastewater rates are expected to increase a combined 91% in the next 15 years. we've talked about this before. the ten-year financial plan. next slide. so these are all the dots here

are sales, past and projected, and the projection is that water sales are going to remain flat over the next ten years. next slide. so this is just a little intellectual exercise. it's not a recommendation, but looking at if we did keep demand about what it is right now, about 198, we could actually manage the drought of record, six years, 87-92, without any rationing, without bringing any new alternative water supplies on-line to get through that. so a lot has changed since that 87-92 drought. we went into that with demand at 293. we're at 198 right now. the water first policy was big. next slide, please. and then, if you add in some rationing, you get 20% rationing in the third year, so this is with the bay-delta plan flows in place, as was the

previous slide, and assuming that san francisco's responsible for 51.7% of those flows, which isn't a certainty, but this is really trying to be conservative, so current demand, we could make it through seven years of the design drought. and then, in the eighth year, you have 224, and you divide that by eight years, and it comes up to eight that you'd need to make it through the design drought. we could make it through the design drought without rationing or any new alternative water supplie.

san francisco could have said yeah, we can get through a five-year drought with no rationing, but by using the design drought, the numbers climbed up to 40% rationing in year three. next slide, please. so i'm going to close with this. this is what i felt was the most promising scenario from the last workshop. and again, this is reducing the length of the design drought by one year, and it's looking at the demand projections there in the second row of the table. again, we think those are inflated. we think those would be much to current demand, maybe even climbing slightly -- so to figure out that scenario -- you need to figure out how long the drought is going to last, what's demand going to be, and

in this case, it was 35 m.g.d., but we could take it down to something more reasonable, maybe 20 or 25 m.g.d. and then create a timeline. so thank you for the opportunity to present, and i wanted to turn it over to my colleague, chris shutes, from the california sports fishing alliance who i think had a few things to share, as well. >> good afternoon. can someone turn on my camera, please? here we go. sorry about that. thanks very much. i wanted to let you all know that we got the message about this workshop on monday and misunderstood that the

alternative water supply component was going to be at the following workshop, so i hurried to put together some work on that, and working with steve and michael carlin, we discovered that would be for the next workshop in september, but i did want to make some comments on what i heard today about demand and how we're looking at it. i really appreciated the technical level of the discussion that everyone has put forward here today. it almost seems like a -- different kinds of discussions that some of us have together and some of it is advocacy and some of it is when we get into the technical details, and it seems like when we start talking about the facts and what some of options and alternatives and variabilities are, we have a much better level of dialogue, so i hope we

can -- variables are, we have a much better level of dialogue, so i hope we can continue with that. one of the things that i heard from steve ritchie is the documents from the water supply were an outside envelope and they were going to do a sensitivity analysis to determine whether some of the variables that were sort of assumed under what she called a normal situation or an average situation, a status quo, might not hold true. and -- and that may give us different results than she had before. and similarly, i think -- well, i guess what i want to say most of all is that it doesn't -- it

seems hard to translate that sort of idea that we need variables and sort of a nuanced view that there's sort of a range of options and possibilities, and we need to translate that into our messaging. it seems like once we get into the messaging of whether or not a flow recommendation is going to be manageable or not, there's sort of a jump that well, we have to look at the most extreme case scenario because if not, we'll be caught out. and what i want to propose to, including bawsca -- and this holds true for the environmental groups, as well, is that we need to be able to talk about things and sort of have sensitivity analysis if you want in our conversations and not just boil down our messaging to simple a, b, and c

kinds of things that -- that tend to bowl arrestize and not lead to solutions. one of the things that we've tried to do in our conversations over the last ten years has been to talk about what the opportunities are to make some of the different things work, things that are otherwise hard and difficult and that, at first blush, seem unrealistic. and if we can sort of change the nature of the dialogue, i think we'll have much more outcomes. it's similar in some ways to the conversation that mr. harrington pointed out about the -- the discussion of the promised amount of water available to bawsca from sfpuc. and it seems like there's this sort of -- two kinds of ways of looking at it. one is that we have to have

that, and is 84 is the real world number -- 184 is the real world number, and we must be there all the time. how can we navigate that so our policy discussions are realistic, but at the same time, the obligations that people have made are held to and people don't feel like they're being short changed or dealt with unfairly? so that concludes my comments. thank you for allowing me to make them. i look forward to making a presentation to you on alternative water supplies and some recommendations for that in september. >> thank you so much. colleagues, do you have any questions for peter or [inaudible]? go ahead, commissioner harrington. >> i don't want to overspeak today, but thank you, chris,

and thank you, peter, for your comments. i think everybody doing projections is always trying to do the most accurate. it's never trying to be inaccurate, but it's trying to do the best projections. you almost have this innate bias to say i need to make sure there's enough water four people when all is said and done. if you're trying to do financial projections, you're always looking at running out of money. it's always, what if i don't sell more? i'm going to run out of money, so the bias has changed -- it's almost impossible to overcome that because they're switching places. what i would love to hear from steve ritchie or michael carlin, can you get a better way to do it? i think that most of us can

figure that there's an optimistic view of the world that really doesn't map. on the other hand, i have no idea if the department of finance historically has been more accurate, but it sure looks better than plan bay area. do you have any sense of whether we should change, how we could change, how that might work, and then, it gets to chris' point that there's different ways to look at that world and what it might range? do you have any thoughts on that, steve? >> well, my thought, actually i've been saying that for years and saying we just need to face the reality that there are two different driver there and we're stuck with that, so that the truth is somewhere in the middle. i've never come up with a methodology for, let's say,

let's find a place to do that. one of the things that we could do is literally split the difference and assume those biases are equal and opposite. as sarah pointed out, at least for the san francisco projections, after you factor out the difference between water sales and -- and water deliveries, taken out water loss, that you end up with about a 9% difference. so cut it in half, the middle is 4.5% between the two. that would be an interesting exercise to actually carry that out and see, okay, what do you end up with that? i think that would certainly be a worthwhile exercise to see if it's helpful because, as i said, we've been saying that for a while. we don't want to build to all of that demand if it's not really going to occur, and i

think we've said yeah, we're clearly not going to do that, but it's going to take some real hard thinking and decision making to decide what is the right answer to go to, but that would be one approach to it. >> i'm so technical after all the other work. see what happens with it. it would be easy to do it, and interesting if it didn't have such real real world impacts, and i'll let my colleagues talk. >> commissioner moran? >> thank you, and really great presentations from everybody. i really appreciate the work that went into it and the tone, and how the tone gets better what when we're talking about quantifiable things, and i

think that's true in these series of workshops. the -- ed brought up the thing that we keep wrestling with, and that's the disparity between our different projections, and peter, from your presentation, one of the things that that makes me thirsty for is a better understanding of plan bay area and what's in there and why. but without that understanding, i'll plow on anyway. the difference is not just a difference in incentives, and i think those -- you know, what ed laid out is 100% right. in the crudest terms, they're worried about getting caught out and either embarrassed or fired or something in between. but the other thing that's going on is that there are

state mandates for housing that we have not been meeting. it is clear from the homeless situation of that we have been woefully negligent in creating housing for a very long time, and it's catching up with us. we have been criticized, and i'm speaking for san francisco as a city, about not approving housing and development, and i think that's true, so it's not just a matter of recognizing incentives, it's also recognizing what the two realities are. and the one reality is if you're a betting person, if you were going to take your own retirement and put that as a wager on what consumption would be over time, it would probably be the lower of the numbers.

if, on the other hand, you put on the hat of saying i'm preparing and trying to facilitate san francisco or the bay area as being a vital place to live and work for the future, then you're going to come up with a different number, and it will be higher. one of the questions i've been wrestling with is how do you square those two, and when do you use maybe one number and when do you use another? the best version i've come up with that so far, and it's just today's version of where my mind is that that higher number is probably the number that you need to be thinking of in terms of long-term decisions. if you, let's say, have a water supply that's capable of meeting the long-term need, and you go with a lower number and

commit it to something else, then, you have compromised your long-term future. the lower number is probably most useful for making shorter term decisions, and something might be, as an example, we have a water first policy, which has put us in the position we are in today. but we also have, under current circumstances, a surplus. when we went through that water budget exercise several months ago, it basically said, under today's circumstances, and if you discount the bay-delta plan, we actually have a surplus in that supply and demand budget. so that -- one of the things you could say about that is that is that allows us to do -- to compromise the water first policy for things that are really temporary.

and by that, i definitely do not mean interruptible customers because i think we have demonstrated amply that there's no such thing, and i think we can say that there's no such thing as a temporary mandate in terms of a water conservation. but i think there's some things that we can do and can't do. what we have done is put some of our supply at risk in order to do more power generation, and if we wanted do, we could decide to do that with some of our surplus and still be able to meet our reliability standards. that could also be done for, you know, we've talked about early implementation of the voluntary agreement. we have some surplus that we

could dedicate to that or early implementation in normal years. each time we do that, we're compromising our drought supply, but the analysis says we can still afford to do some of that and we would still be okay, and that would be the responsible thing to do as long as it were a temporary obligation. and we did that now for the analysis of the adopted management plan. we did this for several years, and unfortunately, it did not have a self-executing element to it, so we stopped doing it, but that was the agreement going in, and everybody held to that agreement. so based on that, the lower demand numbers would be a perfectly reasonable thing to think about. i think where you have more trouble is the longer-term-type

decisions, and where the rubber meets the road is in the water supply assessments that we do. you can't do a water supply assessment that says if the general plan comes true, and if the project in front of us is built, we will have enough water to serve, but we don't really -- and it doesn't matter because they'll never be built. he can't do a water supply assessment that way. it's not what the law allows, it's not what a reasonable and ethical process, you know, on our part would do? but i think it may be helpful to talk about, you know, recognizing what the two numbers are. and either one is generated in bad faith. they are answering different questions. we need to understand those different numbers and what the limits of those numbers are. in the per capita stuff in san francisco, we identified a number of things that require

additional thought, and that may come down over time. regarding the population, if we really understand what's in plan bay area, we might be able to come up with a responsible version of that that's different from either one that still meets our obligation to support the city's future. but i think in those long or short-term perspectives might square the circle that we have between the two different sets of numbers. >> thank you so much. one last comment i will make before we -- sophie, do you have any comments? okay. one last comment i will make, and that's in response to what peter presented, and maybe the discussion we are having right now, which is -- and this is partly based on the research i've personally done on my day job and what i'm seeing, which

is while population growth and plan bay area is all of that is the projections of the future seems to be sort of either used as a prominent sort of facts or the water use increase or considered as a driver, the reality is what we've seen over time is the population growth has not really changed demand overall. even though our population has been growing, demands, total demand has not changed. gone up and down, but still, on average, has been steady over time. and one thing to consider, again, it's not just about per capita water use, it's also about how today, in this time, how we're using water and how we're building. and one other thing, and i suggest maybe, peter, you want to look into this a little bit more, which is also the rate increase. i know it's a very common

perspective that as rates increase, people change their water use. and as i look at both water and energy, you see that rates increase might have a very small impact in water use and sort of reduce it, but it's not as significant. and overall, what we have seen, especially during the previous doubt, especially as rates increase across the states, the water demands drop was not correlated with the increase in pricing. so i think -- and one last thing i would say is i think it's important to think about these major stressors that our water supply is experiencing from, again, climate, economics and this pandemic. god knows what comes next, and

the fact that they just keep coming, and if that is going to be the hammer that hits on top of the demand, god knows where the demand is going to come from, and i think that is something to consider as we are thinking short-term or long-term and where we want to go with those supplies. one thing that nicolle was talking about, i was looking at 100 m.g.d. in water supplies for the peninsula, and let's say some of that is driven by utilities, some of it is actually individually or business oriented, and those actually means that they are going to literally reduce reliance on the utilities that are buying water from. and if you are not actively [inaudible] those as real dense

into the water use, we are not necessarily serving ourselves well because in the long run, we might be over building for something that doesn't -- is not going to come. so just, again, one last thing to chris' point, we have gone for many, many years, depending on the deterministic things is we have to learn how to deal with these ranges of options that are in front of us, and you have to be able to plan for all those different scenarios because otherwise, we are not serving ourselves well. depending on where you are in that utility, and you only have

one line to plan for, you would go with that line because you don't want to be losing our job or your money system. if you are financing, you would go with the lower one, and if you are environmental, you would go with the even lower one. so i think we have to learn how to work with all of those and form a collective one and figure out a path forward based on all of those different scenarios. with that, i'm going to pause -- >> ajami, could i respond to that? >> yes. >> i'm sorry. i don't mean to extend that. >> no, go ahead. >> one thing that i think that nicolle's slide 21 presented was the fact that how policy can drive some of those numbers. 2020, that was something that

no one had a plan to achieve and how you're going to get there, but it did make a difference. similarly, the mandate to achieve noncarbon electricity product by 2050, that's a policy decision, and it's driving a huge amount of change. so one thing that you all might consider is some kind of adaptable jolly to try to limit demand at a certain level, and you can structure your policy in order to account for that. i think that would make a

difference, and i think it has really changed the way people behave. >> okay. thank you so much. okay. madam secretary, can we start public comment, please? thank you. >> clerk: members of the public who wish to make two minutes of public comment specifically on item 3, dial 1-415-655-0001, meeting i.d. 187-655-2935, pound, pound. press star, three to raise your hand to speak. please know that you must limit your comments to the subject discussed. we ask that public comment be made in a civil and respectful matter and that you refrain from using profanity. please address your remarks to the commission as a whole and

not to individual commissioners or staff. mr. moderator, do we have callers? mr. moderator, do we have any callers? >> brad, you're muted. >> operator: sorry about that. madam secretary, there are three callers in the queue. >> clerk: thank you, brad. >> operator: first caller, i've opened your line. you have two minutes. >> this is the same way we have for 20,000 years. carbon dated remains, they

[inaudible] and preserve the water, then came a stranger whose main purpose is greed. these models, departments, do not stand the values of the indigenous people. who will speak for the salmon? not a word about them. your greed has brought fire to our homes, and in future, the fires will incinerate the entire hetch hetchy water. you have stolen the water, and you're trying to make some evaluation and trying to give

some credit that you all will conserve. who will conserve the icebergs? who will conserve the over 1 million gallons leached into the watershed every day? not a mention of this once. you all can wallow in your foolishness, and your foolishness will take you into the cesspool of your own creation. thank you very much. >> operator: thank you for your comments. next caller, i've opened your line. you have two minutes. >> thank you. my name is dave warner. thank you for investing your

time in these highly informative workshops. as one of mr. drekmeier slides indicated, former projections overvalued reductions by a third. it's clear that more thought has been put into projections, but not clear how much that translates into better accuracy. if projections for 2035 is 30% high, that's potentially worth billions of dollars and perhaps priceless environmental benefits. the point is it's worth investing in additional resources and hats off to bawsca for doing a demand study. one of the ways to help with forecast accuracy is to incorporate analyses into the current projection.

what were the reasons for the differences in just five years? at a detailed level, what were the reasons for the metric analyses and how did the different models address those differences? it will be interesting to see how these observations will be incorporated in the upcoming demand core fast. my point is overestimating demand has huge potential consequences, and one of the ways to avoid this is to do detailed analyses on past projections and forecast accordingly. thanks again for the excellent workshop. >> operator: thank you for your comments. hello, caller. i've opened your line. you have two minutes. >> hi.

denise louie. i'm a p.u.c. in san francisco, and it was clear from today's workshop that it's hard to pin down accurate numbers. the numbers are full of uncertainty, but on the other hand, it's very certain that fish populations are suffering, waiting for you to remove or withdraw your lawsuits against the state board -- water board and to let the water flow down the rivers to support fish, fishermen, ecosystems, and the health of the san francisco bay. so i encourage you to think hard, you know, how confident can you be about projections being revised over and over again, time and again, and in the past, have shown to be

overestimating need for human beings when, in fact, populations of fish have been on the decline for decades. and there are barely any delta smelt to be counted. we can't let the same thing happen to the salmon along the tuolomne, so please, reconsider your stance on the lawsuits. withdraw the p.u.c.s objection to the state water boards plan to ensure the health of our bay-delta and the ecosystems, the species that depend on that system, and thank you very much. >> operator: thank you for your comments. hello, caller. i've opened your line.

you have two minutes. >> hi. can you hear me? >> operator: loud and clear. >> awesome. so my mine is regina [inaudible]. i'm calling with the california salmon. we have quite a few members [inaudible] thank you for doing in-depth analysis on this issue, and also thank you for having peter and chris present. i work very closely with them and know that their information is [inaudible]. that said, i do feel like your projections might be a little overblown, and i feel like the -- and the mentioned this. i feel like the people in san francisco really do want to conserve water and do the right thing for the fish within the

bay-delta and the tuolomne river, and i think it's a grave environmental injustice that san francisco continues to file lawsuits against salmon restoration and flows on the tuolomne because a lot of people rely on the bay-delta. so i'm really hoping as you move forward with your planning that you consider the fact that people really do want to conserve and that the people of san francisco are good people that do not agree with these lawsuits and are willing to do what is necessary to make sure that fish continue to be able to be in the bay-delta and in the san francisco bay. so yeah, thank you for your analysis. please keep working on it, and please keep working with peter and chris to make sure that the right things happen for our

fisheries and for the people of san francisco, and thank you so much for hearing from me. >> operator: thank you for your comments. hello, caller. your line is open. you have two minutes. >> hello. this is mark gonzales. i'm a volunteer with the tuolomne river trust, and i heard a comment earlier about, well, let's do 50/50, halfway. actually, the bay-delta water quality control plan already compromised 50%, so i think the city should work as hard as possible to work with increased flows to save the salmons and save the riparian habitat on the river. thank you. >> operator: thank you.

caller, your line is open. you have two minutes. >> hello. this is carol [inaudible], and the chair of the loma prieta [inaudible], and i am calling to say i think we need to make this effort more of a public one, more transparent. efforts like this should be more available to the public, to be in a form that's presenting information that the public can understand and we don't have to have some of this involved. at the same time, i don't think the public was very aware of the lawsuits or aware at all of the lawsuits against the state, and we need to make this an all-hands effort for the entire service area, not just detailed wholesale. we need to have a watershed organization for this watershed saying we can do certain things, but we [inaudible] down

here in the peninsula that's 60-some miles away, so i urge p.u.c. and bawsca to make this effort more of a public one, one that the public can take more effort in and have more layers to it. thanks for doing this. >> operator: thank you for your comments. madam secretary, there are no more callers in the queue. >> clerk: thank you. public comment on this item is closed. >> thank you so much, and thanks for all the comments. i just want to open it up, colleagues, to see if you want to have some discussion around what we saw or any thoughts or comments you have? or not. >> i guess the only thing --

>> go ahead. >> -- that i would have as a comment or question or request is that we be given information about the department of finance and the plan bay area about what those differences really are, and within that what portion of that reflects legal mandates such as affordable housing targets and what is more aspirational. >> yeah. we can do that, definitely. >> go ahead, commissioner. >> commissioner ajami, i'm not sure i completely understood what you said, but i think you said we spend all this time looking at projections, and

when all is said and done, it doesn't matter -- not that it doesn't matter, but the projections for population have been offset by the changes that we've made in our lives, and so after all is said and done, it works itself out, but we spend all this time, and we have all these real world impacts of making all these projections, and i wonder if that's one of the options, saying, when you go back, they offset, and do you believe that they'll offset in the future, and we can just get overall s.f.? i understand what you're saying, but that's actually kind of intriguing. >> so thank you for asking that question. what i was saying is what we've seen overtime is as water demand grows and population grows, we've seen demand grow over time, they have all these different variables, and what we see is population is not really a significant driver of

demand anymore, so -- and i'm not saying it's not important. it's just like if it's not really playing a role, maybe we are -- and if -- if -- imagine if your model only uses population and economic growth as the driver of water demand, and neither of those right now are really showing to be doing the correct -- being the correct variable to have your model, then your model is incorrect. if you're doing this the same way 100 years ago, what have you been doing wrong over time? we keep learning, and we have to adjust our modelling and projections as we move forward. and one thing i say is, you know, i often deal with my

colleagues and they talk about climate forecast, and what i've actually seen over time being on both sides of this, here, as an actuary, in our ecological forecast and climate forecast, as in our economic forecast, we keep learning and adding knowledge to our work, and we are trying to improve ourselves in different ways, and as our hydrologic and climate forecast have improved over time, we have to do the same in demand forecasting, and we should not dismiss it as something that's only driven by economics, only driven by population because the reality is it is not. so that is it. one last thing, with all the efforts going on across the world, all of these efforts are

on 50 liter homes. 50 liters per home. we can recycle water from your toilet, from your shower, so you end up with just basically a very little amount of water that's going to be used in your home. and my fear is 50 years from now, we look back and say oh, my gosh, half of san francisco that was rebuilt -- obviously, it's not all going to be 50-liter homes, but we are going to get there. and if we see this coming, the fact is we have to be a little bit broader in the way we think. what impacts our water use because things that is just in our control and think about things that are not in our control. i hope that makes sense. >> yeah. i think i would like to say that maybe chris hit a note, and that is, what are our goals? what could be? what could happen? and maybe, like he mentioned,

with our fuel use, we could do the same thing with water, and we could give people just the same example that you just gave us. this is what could happen, this is what other countries are doing, they're calling it new water. it has nutrients, it has other things in it, and talk about projecting what we would like to happen and what could happen and where we would like to go and where we could go, and if we start doing that, people would start thinking about it differently. you're right. we're using old methods, and this is a new day and a new time, and i think these conversations are wonderful, and i want to thank the staff, chris ritchie and his staff. i want to thank peter and chris and everybody for really carrying as much as you do because this will make the

difference. thank you. >> absolutely. any other final thoughts? i also want to, you know, add my tanks -- thanks to see staff, nicolle and her staff, peter, and chris for joining us. i think it's really good to have these productive conversations, and i know it's frustrating sometimes to see how slow things move forward. but look, the reality is we all have to look at how moving forward and how every one of these steps are happening, and that hopefully informs the decision making process in the future and informs our decision making process and what we do and sort of help everybody in the bay area to move forward

that we are responding to all of these social and climate stressors in a more responsive way. with that -- >> well, one more thing. i'd like to thank bawsca for all of your work and all of these peninsula people have taken things seriously. all the difference that they have made, it's just amazing, so thank you all. and we are all in this together, under the same tent, and i think we're going in the same direction. >> and with that, i think if there are no other final comments, we would adjourn. okay. perfect. have a wonderful weekend, everybody. >> you, too. thank you.

>> the teams really, really went above and beyond and is continuing to do that today. this past year, the san francisco public utilities commission water quality division started receiving many more requests to test for lead

in the public school system here in san francisco as a result of legislation that had passed from the state requiring all of the public schools to do lead testing. and so as a result, the public utilities commission and the water quality team in particular was asked to meet with the san francisco unified school district to begin to prioritize which schools to test to meet that state mandate. >> the team that tests, we're a full service environmental laboratory, and we take care of both the needs of the water quality division and the waste water enter price. and on the water quality enterprise, we have to also have drinking water that meets all federal and state quality regulations. and lead in schools, we're playing a problem in remediating this problem of lead in schools. >> our role here in communications is being able to take the data that we have that

we know is protective of public health and safety and transmit it, give it to the public in a way they understand we are really doing our jobs well and making sure that they are safe always. >> the public learned very quickly all the accurate facts and all the critical information that they needed to know, and it's up to these individuals and their agencies and their commitment to the city. >> i enjoy the work because i can help people, and i can help the utilities to provide a better water quality, make sure that people feel that drinking hetch hetchy water is actually a pride. >> hats off to the water quality team because between them working on late nights, working on the weekends when the schools are closed, and working as a partner in the school district for the times they found a higher lead sample, they worked through to address that, so the team went above and beyond and is continuing to do that today.

. >> the san francisco carbon fund was started in 2009. it's basically legislation that was passed by the board of supervisors and the mayor's office for the city of san francisco. they passed legislation that said okay, 13% of the cost of the city air travel is going to go into a fund and we're going to use the money in that fund to do local projects that are going to mitigate and sequester greenhouse gas emission. the grants that we're giving, they're anywhere from 15,000

to, say, $80,000 for a two year grant. i'm shawn rosenmoss. i'm the development of community partnerships and carbon fund for the san francisco department of environment. we have an advisory committee that meets once or twice a year to talk about, okay, what are we going to fund? because we want to look at things like equity and innovative projects. >> i heard about the carbon fund because i used to work for the department of environment. i'm a school education team. my name is marcus major. i'm a founding member of climate action now. we started in 2011. our main goal it to remove carbon in the public right-of-way on sidewalks to build educational gardens that teach people with climate change. >> if it's a greening grant,

75% of the grant has to go for greening. it has to go for planting trees, it has to go for greening up the pavement, because again, this is about permanent carbon savings. >> the dinosaur vegetable gardens was chosen because the garden was covered in is afault since 1932. it was the seed funding for this whole project. the whole garden,ible was about 84,000 square feet, and our project, we removed 3,126 square feet of cement. >> we usually issue a greening rft every other year, and that's for projects that are going to dig up pavement, plant trees, community garden, school garden. >> we were awarded $43,000 for this project. the produce that's grown here is consumed all right at large

by the school community. in this garden we're growing all kinds of organic vegetables from lettuce, and artichokes. we'll be planting apples and loquats, all kinds of great fruit and veggies. >> the first project was the dipatch biodiesel producing facility. the reason for that is a lot of people in san francisco have diesel cars that they were operating on biodiesel, and they were having to go over to berkeley. we kind of the dog batch preferentials in the difference between diesel and biodiesel. one of the gardens i love is the pomeroy rec center. >> pomeroy has its roots back

to 1952. my name is david, and i'm the chamber and ceo of the pomeroy rehabilitation and recreation center. we were a center for people with intellectual and development cal disabilities in san francisco san francisco. we also have a program for individuals that have acquired brain injury or traumatic brain injury, and we also have one of the larger after school programs for children with special needs that serves the public school system. the sf carbon fund for us has been the launching pad for an entire program here at the pomeroy center. we received about $15,000. the money was really designed to help us improve our garden by buying plants and material and also some infrastructure

like a drip system for plants. we have wine barrels that we repurposed to collect rain water. we actually had removed over 1,000 square feet of concrete so that we could expand the garden. this is where our participants, they come to learn about gardening. they learn about our work in the greenhouse. we have plants that we actually harvest, and eggs from our chickens that we take up and use in cooking classes so that our participants learn as much as anybody else where food comes from. we have two kitchens here at the pomeroy center. one is more of a commercial kitchen and one is more setup like a home kitchen would be, and in the home kitchen, we do a lot of cooking classes, how to make lasagna, how to comsome eggs, so this grant that we received has tremendous value, not only for our center, for

our participants, but the entire community. >> the thing about climate, climate overlaps with everything, and so when we start looking at how we're going to solve climate programs, we solve a lot of other problems, too. this is a radical project, and to be a part of it has been a real honor and a privilege to work with those administrators with the sf carbon fund at the department of environment. >> san francisco carbon grant to -- for us, opened the door to a new -- a new world that we didn't really have before; that the result is this beautiful garden. >> when you look at the community gardens we planted in schools and in neighborhoods, how many thousands of people now have a fabulous place to walk around and feel safe going outside and are growing their own food. that's a huge impact, and we're just going to keep rolling that out and keep rolling that

>> we have private and public gardens throughout the garden tour. all of the gardens are volunteers. the only requirement is you're willing to show your garden for a day.

so we have gardens that vary from all stages of development and all gardens, family gardens, private gardens, some of them as small as postage stamps and others pretty expansive. it's a variety -- all of the world is represented in our gardens here in the portola. >> i have been coming to the portola garden tour for the past seven or eight years ever since i learned about it because it is the most important event of the neighborhood, and the reason it is so important is because it links this neighborhood back to its history. in the early 1800s the portola was farmland. the region's flowers were grown in this neighborhood. if you wanted flowers anywhere future bay area, you would come

to this area to get them. in the past decade, the area has tried to reclaim its roots as the garden district. one of the ways it has done that is through the portola garden tour, where neighbors open their gardens open their gardens to people of san francisco so they can share that history. >> when i started meeting with the neighbors and seeing their gardens, i came up with this idea that it would be a great idea to fundraise. we started doing this as a fund-raiser. since we established it, we awarded 23 scholarships and six work projects for the students. >> the scholarship programs that we have developed in association with the portola is just a win-win-win situation all

around. >> the scholarship program is important because it helps people to be able to tin in their situation and afford to take classes. >> i was not sure how i would stay in san francisco. it is so expensive here. i prayed so i would receive enough so i could stay in san francisco and finish my school, which is fantastic, because i don't know where else i would have gone to finish. >> the scholarships make the difference between students being able to stay here in the city and take classes and having to go somewhere else. [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] >> you come into someone's home and it's they're private and personal space. it's all about them and really their garden and in the city and urban environment, the garden is the extension of their indoor environment, their outdoor

living room. >> why are you here at this garden core? it's amazing and i volunteer here every year. this is fantastic. it's a beautiful day. you walk around and look at gardens. you meet people that love gardens. it's fantastic. >> the portola garden tour is the last saturday in september every year. mark your calendars every year. you can see us on the website

today is friday, july 16th, 2021. i would ask the clerk to do a roll call. >> clerk: okay. my name is deborah caplan deputy director of the mayor's office on disability and i will proceed with some opening remarks and t