This study session was held on October 21, 2025, to review the agenda for the regular council meeting and discuss several capital improvement and grant items. Councilmembers also shared updates on community events. No formal votes were taken, as this was a discussion-only session.
Note: The transcript references the meeting date as October 20, 2025, but the assigned meeting time is October 21, 2025 (01:30 UTC). The summary uses the provided date.
Well, welcome to the Mesa City Council meeting study session for October 20th, 2025. Uh Councilmember Goforth is unable to attend this. She's excuse otherwise, all council members are present. Item one is to review the agenda for tonight's council meeting. I know we went over this uh agenda, council. Are there any questions about tonight's agenda? If not, I have one on 4A, and that's the water. That's the drilling in the well. Of course, I like water, I get thirsty now and then, Chris. Sorry. But maybe you can just tell us it shows a 4.5 million dollars uh in the cost of the well. Is that just for the equipment, excluding the cost to drill the well? So combine, maybe break it down between the drilling of a well site and totally equip. Sure, mayor council. So this is Desert Well 7, and this contract, it was a bid, so it's a bid award just to equip the well. So we already drilled it a couple years ago, and that was a separate contract to a driller that was about two, two and a half million, if I remember correctly. So this four and a half million would be everything after equipping, so it'd be building the site, all of the equipment, the electrical, just everything to get it to be operational. So drilling a well and equipping it, you're talking about about six point seven million dollars today. Correct. Which is a big departure from if you go back to 2019, um, viewer less than half of that. Yeah. Well, all right. Well, that was my question because I know that we've talked about putting some well sites on hold because of the cost to drill and equip them. But then this is something that we have to get in here our water portfolio for well site, especially in the southeast part of Mesa. Correct. And so this this well actually, so this is a redrill drill. There was already a desert well seven. This is uh a long haws between baseline Guadalupe area. Okay. And so the existing Desert Well 7, it's like a lot of our older well inventory, half century old, needed to be redrilled, so we redrilled it. Uh the good news is we're gonna get a lot more capacity than the old well. So that's good, and it's in a good spot, it's central, east central mesa. But then also another good part of the story is we bid this. So engineers' estimates, they still tend to be lofty in terms of not really understanding where costs are going. So we really worked with engineering to try to see what the market would bear. And some of the engineers' estimates for this was approaching nine million for this, and uh, there were three bids in the fours. So the market was very telling. Uh, it's getting a lot more competitive, and we had can't remember how many bidders total, but we had closer to ten than we had five. We had a lot of bidders and good contractors too. Very good. Are we drilling them deeper in the aquifer than they are today? Well, it depends on where you're at in the city. These are gonna be a thousand to twelve hundred feet deep. Okay. I know it takes a lot of horsepower to pull that water out of that deep. Right. All right, that's the only question I had on that. Thank you for the overview. Council, any other questions. All right, I would just like to highlight 5C.