All right.

Well, welcome everybody.

First, I want to just take a minute to recognize our new city manager today, Janine Jordan, doing her first work session.

So we just want to welcome Janine.

Very excited.

And here about a little over a week, I guess, right?

Week and a half almost.

Yep, absolutely.

So just want to welcome her.

So all right, let's go ahead and just jump in.

Meeting follow-up.

Does anybody have anything they wanted?

What was a couple weeks ago?

No.

Pat, Mike, you guys have anything for the last meeting?

I do not.

Okay, thank you.

All right, let's go ahead and move into the seminal pump storage I'm gonna throw that to you.

Janine.

Thank you.

Um, Council, this project has been in the works for a few years.

Um, I've learned a lot about it the last week and um had the benefit of uh speaking with your city attorney about it, who had a lot of background information.

Um he and I briefed on it last week.

We've also um read information, everything that we can find available around the project, and uh with Eric's help, prepare the material in your packet, which we hope is a fairly succinct um summary of about a thousand pages of documents related to this project.

Um, Eric did prepare that, so I want to acknowledge and thank him for doing that, and he will lead off um covering the material that he prepared for you tonight.

And if you have any questions for me, I'm happy to take those, otherwise, I'll turn it over to Eric.

Great.

Thank you, uh, Madam City Manager Mayor.

I think I'm gonna go to the podium just because it seems a little more natural.

Yeah.

So thank you for the opportunity to uh speak to you about a pump storage project uh often referred to as a seminar seminal pump storage uh project uh by R Plus Hydro, uh, which is a corporation based out of Salt Lake City.

Um in addition to the memo in your packet, I did uh attach uh both a presentation from R Plus Hydro that they gave to the Carbon County Commissioners as well as the Carbon County uh commissioners' uh comments uh on the project.

Um this this project is located in Carbon County, um, but um based on the proposal uh does appear to potentially uh have some impacts uh downstream uh on the North Platte River and potentially uh on the City of Casper's interests.

And so I'll kind of briefly walk you through what the project is, um of uh what the uh company has proposed as benefits, um, and then I'll walk you through uh what some of the concerns and comments have been.

Um just to kind of get to the punchline.

What staff would recommend um is that uh council give thumbs to staff preparing a comment letter to be submitted on behalf of the city.

Um that deadline is January 2nd, which is this uh Friday.

Um, so it's pretty short uh turnaround.

I did also include kind of a draft letter of comment that more or less incorporates the position of Carbon County.

Um after speaking uh with uh city manager Jordan.

Um I think there's probably additional information that we would include in there, and so you know, yeah, with your blessing, it would be probably a little bit more robust.

Um but with that outline uh I'll I'll just start a little bit um with regard to what what the project is.

And so if you're familiar with that area out by semino and Pathfinder, there's there's quite a bit of renewable energy wind farms, and so that ties into the grid and is shot off to all points west into Utah, Nevada, um California.

Um the problem with renewable energy is that it's great when the wind is blowing, which is often the case in Wyoming, but there are actually are times when the wind stops blowing and there's no electricity being produced.

And so storage of that electricity is always kind of been the bugaboo.

And what this uh project um portends to do is to develop a storage system for electricity.

And it's a fairly simple concept on some levels.

Um, what the company is proposing is to develop an upper reservoir uh above seminal, and these uh wind turbines would generate electricity, which would then power pumps, and they would pump water up into this upper reservoir that would be be stored.

And then in times of downtimes when there's no wind or electricity being generated by the turbines, this water can then be let out of that upper reservoir, thereby turning electrical generators, generating electricity, which would then be pumped into the grid and then shipped all points west.

And I think it's it's fairly common knowledge that some of Western states, West Coast states specifically have certain carbon mandates, and so they rely on renewable energy from Wyoming to meet these emission standards, and so this would help to even out that flow of electricity west and help them meet those those goals.

And so the upper reservoir itself is anticipated to encompass approximately 120 acres of land, have a capacity of 13,000 acre feet of water, which if you compare that to the overall storage of seminal, that's about one percent of the seminal volume.

It would occupy a fair uh number of acres.

Um prior to the latest permutation, uh it appeared that there'd be about a thousand twenty-five acres of Bureau of Rec land management property that would be dedicated to this project, uh, 77 acres of Bureau of REC land and about 830 acres of private land as well.

And so this federal land being involved triggers certain federal requirements.

Um in addition to the FERC requirements and the requirement for a major permit.

Um, before you can even get to that, you have to comply with the environmental uh NEPA and to do an environmental impact uh assessment or statement.

And so that's um that draft document has been released and is now in the common period.

So based on what R plus Hydro presented, um they would be investing three to four billion dollars.

Um it would generate uh nine million dollars annually in property tax uh for carbon county is what they estimate.

Um there would be a fair number of temporary construction jobs, uh, but then permanently about 30 to 35 jobs.