The Castle Rock Town Council met on February 6, 2024, at 6:00 PM in the Town Hall Council Chambers. The meeting covered a wide range of topics including the town manager's report on wastewater costs and legislative updates, development activity updates, the town attorney's annual report, several annexation and zoning items, a discussion on reducing the Cobblestone Metro District mill levy, amendments to the water rights dedication code, and a policy review of electronic participation and hybrid meetings. All votes were unanimous except for the hybrid meeting policy direction.
Okay then. With that, we'll move on to the town manager's report. Good evening, Mayor and Council. A couple items I'm I want to mention, and then uh uh Mark and Kristen and Tara are going to come up as well. Uh Shannon brings up the calendar reminders. Please let uh Shannon know if you're planning on attending the chamber um Gala here in uh February. They're looking for final hit count in uh meal preferences, so um that would be um appropriate. Um I believe on the 19th is the um service for JoePro, is that they have that date right on the 19th? The 19th at two o'clock at the uh fairgrounds defense center. So I sent you all a note on that, and we'll participate with uh flowers and uh in a card from from council. Um the community recognizes uh Joe's service, not just to the community but to the nation. Um and then you see the rest of the uh items there. We've got an open house that we're gonna have up at uh the ACC uh facility there in March. We're doing that because uh one of the heavy areas of emphasis in the pavement maintenance program this year is gonna be in the meadows um area, and um uh you'll be seeing those bids on a future council um agenda item, and we do like to let the public know what's uh what's going on. It's a major endeavor for the community every year, so we'll have that going on as well. The next slide uh just has one of the neighborhood meetings. Um, and this is uh Wellspring and Castle Oaks Church's interest in the quality inn hotel. This is not the La Kinta Inn, which is now under construction, and we participated in that project by a waiver of some of the uh the the town fees. They have an interest in the the other hotel that is um I guess you could say is adjacent to it, is nearby of turning it into another facility as well. So they're having a uh neighborhood meeting on February the twelfth. So we want to let the the community and you all be reminded about that. With that, uh Mark is gonna come up and talk about um wastewater and wastewater rates. Everybody's favorite subject, wastewater. Uh yes, yes, and about wastewater. So uh I always like to say there is no wastewater, all water is water, and we want to hang on to it. But I did want to give council an update on uh PCW Plum Creek Water Reclamation Authority's latest utility master plan update. So they last did an update in 2017, and this was the next update. And this plan is designed to look 20 years out at potential costs, both from a regulatory and permitting standpoint, and also from a growth and capacity standpoint. And so they've done that. Um and keep in mind we just finished an expansion from 6.4 million gallons a day to 9.5 million gallons a day, which most of that capacity is for us. It's important also understand that currently Plum Creek is operating under an administratively extended permit, which means the permit is still officially for 6.4 million gallons and not nine and a half. Um, but the permit has been extended. We are supposed to get a new permit for the facility at some point here in the near future. Um the big the big news with this 20-year lookout is there's a potential for a significant need for capital investment to meet permit requirements that may be coming down the line, as well as to a lesser extent growth requirements, of course, for Castle Rock. And I just wanted to make this council aware of that. So in theory, they're talking about as much as 295 million dollars worth of improvements over the next 20 years, the next two decades, which is a big number. If we were to get a new permit this year that included all of the requirements that may be coming down the line here. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Of the 295 million, it's important to remember that we're about 76% of the total cost in terms of the capacity that we own and operate. So that's 223 million. Of that, about 188 million is related to the regulatory requirements that may be coming down the line, and about 35 million to capacity increases that we would put in place to meet future growth. So you can see growth is a much smaller part of this. This just kind of gives you a worst case scenario of what this might look like in this little graph, and you can see if we got a permit in 2024, oftentimes what happens with permits is they put you on a five-year compliance schedule to come up to speed with whatever new permit requirements are put in place. There are three in particular that were part of what we call the preliminary effluent limits that were evaluated for the plant based on the plant expansion that we just did, and that was manganese, chloride, and temperature. And in theory, we could have to come into compliance with those in a five-year time frame. You can also see nitrate and nitrite on there. Those are also part of that five-year time frame. And the problem with that is we would have to invest that $188 million of compliance over a five-year time frame, which would obviously be very difficult from a cost standpoint. So that's really the big concern here. You can see there's some other things on here, but they're further out towards 2043.