The Bend City Council held a work session beginning at 5:00 p.m. followed by a regular meeting at 7:00 p.m. on February 21, 2024. The work session covered a water system overview and in-conduit hydro feasibility study, direction on bridge types for the Hawthorne Crossing, and a discussion on transportation system development charges (SDCs). The regular meeting included a consent agenda, a public hearing on a street name change, approval of debt issuances, affordable housing fund allocations, and construction amendments for the Purcell Boulevard and Neff & Purcell intersection projects.
Where did Mary get that sticker? I think am I not sharing? One more time. Coming. There it is. All right. Okay. There we go. Ready to start. Okay, so let's get started with our work session. We are called to order. Council Norris is excused tonight. So we're starting with water system overview and inconduit hydro feasibility. Hi. Hi, thanks, Council. Really excited to share some of the results of our study year with you all. So just like Miss Keebler said, we will be going over the results of the inconduit hydrofeasibility study. So what we plan to present tonight, what we plan to cover is a review of the findings from the study, discussion about what the report's recommendations are, and then a look at the next steps and just a general concurrence from council that we're heading in the direction you'd like us to proceed with. And then finally answering any questions that we have moving forward. So with that, I'll hand it off to Lori to give us an overview of the water system. Yes, thanks, Austin. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Lori Feya, Environmental Resources Manager for the Utilities Department. And I'm just going to kick this off for Austin a little bit with some just some background about our water sources, and it might be a refresher about where our water comes from, and then this will support why we did the feasibility study and the results of that. So the graphic on the screen is kind of a cartoon graphic of Ben's drinking water sources, just to remind everybody that we have two sources of drinking water. So on the graph you can see at the far left, it says source springs. That's our surface water supply source at Prowl Springs. That water we uh pull water from the source springs. Uh it gets transported into Bridge Creek and then into our intake facility where there's uh 10 miles of pipeline to go down to the outback facility where there's the water filtration plant. So that's our surface water source, and I'll talk a little bit more about that as well in just a minute. Um the other thing you can note on the graphic is we have our second water source, which is groundwater, and um it shows some of the locations of our 20 drinking water wells that pull water about a thousand feet up from underground from the regional uh water aquifers, and um supplies water also to the city of Bend. So if you could click to the next one, Austin. Thank you. So let me first talk just really briefly about the surface water source. Um the municipal watershed was established uh about a hundred years ago, and it is considered our primary source of water, so that's where we get about 60 percent of our water. We uh use that as the primary source year-round. Uh one of the primary reasons we do that is not only it's a great quality, but it's gravity-fed. So we have a lot of elevation difference, and that can carry the water down into the plant and down into the city with a very low carbon footprint. This is a protected watershed that we partner with the U.S. Forest Service on. Um we've highlighted here on the slide what's important uh relevant to our water use and also the inconduit hydro topic, is we take more than no more than 18.2 cubic feet per second. That is dictated in our city code. It's also dictated in our Forest Service special use permit. And that that would not change. That's the maximum we can take. Um I'll note that the photo there is of our intake facility that was built about 10 years ago, and it replaced an older facility. One of the great things about this this newer facility is it allows us to just take the amount of water that's being demanded in the water system. So we don't take any more than we need. There's no other place for extra water to go. So we have daily demand information.