executed a wifia loan with the united states environmental protection agency. wifia is an acronym for the water infrastructure finance and innovation act and provides low interest loans to municipalities for qualified wastewater projects. the 2018 loan, which is in the approximate amount of $699 million, partially funded the biosolids project. it was executed at an interest rate of 3.09%, which at the time was a very low interest rate relative to where the market was at the time and relative to what we would have been paying had we issued revenue bonds, which is our default long-term funding mechanism, so it looked real good back in 2018. so the first of your two items, item number 12, asks you to approve a replacement to the 2018 loan, or a reexecution that will reduce the interest rate to a level representative of today's interest rate environment, which is much, much lower than where rates were when we executed the 2018 loan. in today's market, the rate on a loan would be approximately 1.86%, almost half of the interest rate on the 2018. all the terms and co