The council convened for a committee of the whole session to receive a presentation on the EPA Administrative Order on Consent regarding Duluth's water system, followed by discussion of the consent agenda and several resolutions. No public comments were heard. Key discussions included water infrastructure investments, legislative priorities, and the Bayfront Festival Park management contract.
All right, we'll start another thirty seconds. All right, good evening, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started with our agenda session. At the top of the hour, we're starting here with a committee of the whole. There we go. Good. I think I'm gonna have to tell you Alyssa. That wouldn't the next slide. The clicker isn't working, so but we're good for now. Uh nope, back one. So just a quick overview of the the water system. It's a fairly complex water system relative to other cities in Minnesota due to our the length of the city and the topography. Um much of it is very old. We've got the pump house where everything starts 1989, then the Lakewood treatment plant, 1975. Takes uh water through the transmission mains that were 1898. We've got 11 pump stations throughout the system, 15 reservoirs, 433 miles of water main, and 28,000, close to 29,000 customer services. Next slide. This is an overview of the uh a graphical overview of the distribution system, and important to note that we provide water to three adjacent cities, Rice Lake Proctor, and Hermantown. Next slide. A few photos. Uh this one's relatively important because it is our most expensive project that we will be undertaking in the future. This is a uh one of our filters. There's five that are in operation and a sixth that was built in 1975 but never put into uh into play. Um I'm not sure why. Maybe they were looking for future expansion of the city, but it's a we're at a time uh in history where we need to implement this, and it's fairly expensive, and I'll explain that in a little more detail later on. Reservoirs and tanks uh make up uh a large percentage of what we have to do in the future, and the picture on the left is a nice uh photo of what the inside of a ground storage tank looks like, and then everybody's seen what an elevated tower looks like, and we've got both of those in our system that brings us to the administrative order on consent. Um in September of 2023, the EPA and uh Minnesota Department of Health conducted an inspection of our system with very little notice, maybe a day or two, then they showed up. Um shortly after that, City Council received a uh a notice of deficiencies, and then there were many follow-on meetings, which brings us to present uh of the signing of the order. What I want to do for the remainder of the presentation is go over a summarize what that order entails. The uh the most important thing I want to note is that nowhere in that administrative order that the water quality was ever an issue. Uh we have and continue to have some of the best water in the world. So that's important to note that the majority of the areas of concern were on our um the physical components of the system. And all of these, this is a summary of the area of concern, the areas of concern, and we knew about all of these. Staff was aware of all of these, and we had plans to correct them over many years, and the EPA came in and said, No, you need to do it in, you know, we had this many years, now we have this many years to conduct it. And a summary of a few of these, um, the lab, some turbidity sampling, lead sampling, uh moving down the flocculation and sedimentation. We've got a flocculator that has paddles in it that sometime in the 1990s somebody turned off. I don't know why, uh, but our system's been able to work adequately without them. But the EPA said we need to put those back into play. Such a large expense. Uh the treatment plant, I talked about the filters. They want us to install the sixth filter, which is our most expensive capital project in the future. A redundant water source. They weren't satisfied with our sole source of water going into Lake Superior, so we have to come up with a plan to provide an additional or alternate sources of water to provide to our customers. The Lakewood Pump Station under Pump Station Maintenance, Lakewood Pump House structure that was built in 1898, well, well over a hundred years old. The rough is original needs to be replaced. There's some structural concerns also on that on that pump house. On the right hand side, reservoirs. We've got a lot of reservoirs. Each one of them has different little idiosyncrasies that need to be maintained. And then at the bottom on the right, there's operational changes that we've made already, and some they want us to do in the future.