Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the Parks Arts and Culture Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us and the Parts Arts and Culture Committee starting now.

Welcome to Parks Art and Culture Committee.

And I represent Lucky District number seven.

And I'll start introductions here on my left with council members.

Well, good morning.

Uh Darren Watson, hi.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Great.

Well, we are so excited to hear from Parks and Rec this morning and water conservation.

So if you all want to introduce your team and then go ahead and get started, that would be great.

Of course, Jill Kaufman, director of park operations.

Yeah, hi, my name's Damian Wetzel.

I'm the water conservation manager.

And I'm Lynn Fulton, I'm a crew lead in the water conservation department.

Awesome.

Take it away.

Your slides are now up there.

Great.

Well, thanks for having us.

Like I said, I'm the water conservation manager, water conservation.

Beautiful.

I love that.

Yeah, that's uh we got a few more drone pictures coming up later.

We have uh in-house drone pilot.

Oh, I was gonna say, how did you get that picture?

Three we have three licensed pilots in uh parks and rec.

Okay, awesome.

Sorry.

That was back in COVID when the civic center crew mowed the our names are over it, but they mowed the heart in the house.

So yeah, water conservation is a group that works uh throughout the whole city, and we're but we're housed under the park operations umbrella.

Um thanks for having us today.

We're here to talk about uh all things irrigation.

Irrigation um is basically the invisible lifeblood of the parks and rec system.

Unfortunately, uh you really only see it when something's wrong with it.

You know, you got a broken head or it's running when it's not supposed to, but for the majority of the time it's doing what it's supposed to, and it's what enables us to have our beautiful park system here in the high arid climate that that Denver is.

Um so we have a myriad of challenges.

Um, managing such a large system in Denver Parks.

Uh, we use over two billion gallons of water a year that costs the city uh a little over five million dollars a year.

Uh we are Denver Waters' largest customer um on a volume basis.

Um, and then a lot of the challenges recently is uh high temperatures, very unpredictable weather.

I mean, it was just 80 some degrees on Sunday in November.

Um, and then we also have uh increased our acreage recently, um acquiring a lot of new land, so that adds more work to uh the staff, and then the uh pressure on the system has increased quite a bit as well with the growing population and everyone getting outdoors in the parks.

That puts a lot of pressure on our on our park system and the and the irrigation system, and then recently the cost of doing business has gone up just like everything else.

Um, I started with Denver Parks 15 years ago as the irrigation tech in the Montbellow and Green Valley Ranch area, and back then uh an irrigation we use commercial quality like irrigation heads is about 20 bucks.

Now that that same sprinkler head costs about 80 dollars.

Wow.

Uh we also estimate that uh the pressure and vandalism has gone up by 50 percent uh since the COVID days.

So a lot of theft, uh copper theft, um, and then just you know kicking heads off and whatnot in the middle of the night.

So that's gone up quite a bit.

Um, but here in the water conservation department, we are achieving the game plan goal of adapting to our changing climate, and that's through a lot of different water efficiency um strategies, and a big one that we implemented is uh the central control build out, and I'm gonna go into that in quite a bit more depth.

Um, but just an overview of uh our infrastructure.

Uh right now our staffing levels, we have 38 irrigation maintenance technicians across the city, and that's managing 3,300 irrigated acres.

So that's all of our park land that has irrigation.

Doesn't include mountain parks or some areas in our metro parks that don't have irrigation.

We estimate that to contain a quarter million sprinkler heads.

So it's a massive system, and then if you break that down for each irrigation technician, they're responsible by themselves for around 87 acres, which would have 6,500 irrigation heads, and then everything associated with that maintenance throughout the year, which we uh the irrigation season is typically April 15th through October 15th.

Um so they're responsible for activating the system, uh running through inspections, zone checks, you know, if you find anything wrong, making timely repairs.

Um we adhere by the Denver water rules and making those pairs repairs within 10 days.

Um we get we usually get to them much quicker than that.