Welcome everyone to our Mesa City Council study session.

It's nice just, you know, I I did realize we're running a few minutes late.

Uh we're just kind of enjoying uh the day, the morning.

Uh the study session for February 12th, 2026.

Uh, Vice Mayor Summers and Council Member Adams are participating by Zoom.

Otherwise, all other council members are present.

Item one is a presentation.

We're going to uh postpone item one A to a further date.

So, Mayor, we will uh yeah, thank you for the understanding um about the need to reschedule item one.

So we'll uh work to get that rescheduled just as soon as possible.

Okay.

Then moving on, uh item one B is a presentation to receive an update on the current conditions of the Colorado River and impacts to the City of Mesa water portfolio.

Mr.

Hassard or Jesse Haywood, thank you, Mr.

Haywood.

Our retiring uh water resources director.

You sure you don't want to reconsider?

Paperwork's already done, Mayor.

We could cancel it.

It's such a hassle to try to undo all that.

Trust me, Mayor, we've tried.

We've tried.

I'm sure we have to fight with your wife.

Yes, you would, you would indeed.

Uh well, thank you.

And and uh as you recognize, I do have Jesse Haywood, assistant director here with me today.

He's gonna uh participate in this discussion, which is uh an important overview related to the Colorado River.

Um let me start with you probably see in in the media quite a bit um a lot of articles that talk about the Colorado River and and basin states and drought and uh all of those things, and it's it's it's pretty persistent.

Um so with that, if we can go to the first slide.

So all of that is because the 20-year operating guidelines for the Colorado River that were drafted in 2007 are expiring at the end of this year.

So that in itself is not that big a deal, but coupled with the fact that we're going into year 26 of a prolonged drought that's been very persistent.

We've had a couple of years here and there that have been promising with a lot of snowpack, but then they they tend to be backed up by then a series of very dry years.

So water bless you.

So water levels on the on the whole system, both in Lake Mead and Lake Powell have continued to drop.

Um there's seven basin states that receive Colorado River water.

Um Arizona is one of those.

We've been in negotiations, all seven states together, trying to formulate what the the next 20-year plan uh playbook, if you will, is gonna look like on the Colorado River.

Uh it's been very tenuous, those negotiations.

It hasn't gone well.

Every every state is different, every state has different interests, and they're set up differently.

So the federal government, they had hoped that the seven basin states would work something out, but it's looking like at the end of the day, they're gonna have to make the call.

Another thing I should say is because the the operating guidelines on the Colorado River have such a direct impact on the environment, the NEPA process, the federal NEPA process is required.

And under the NEPA process, it starts with the environmental impact statement, and the draft environmental impact statement, which had been in the works for about two years, was just released recently.

And none of the alternatives that are in the draft bode very well for Arizona.

There's cuts, even very significant cuts to the Central Arizona project, which is CAP, and that's important to Mesa, all the valley cities, um, stretching all the way down actually to Tucson, because that's how we receive our share of the Colorado River water is through CAP.

So with that backdrop, what we wanted to do today is tell you specifically how we're doing here in Mesa, what our water supply looks like.

We're gonna give you probably the most detailed breakdown that we ever have for you to show you where our water comes from, how it what it consists of, um, and then show a history.

Jesse's gonna walk through a few graphs that talk about the the history of both our demand and how we've built our supply over the years.

So with that, let's go to the next slide.

So this is our whole city service area.

And it shows the different zones.

We have the city zone, which we're sitting in right now, which is served by SRP, and then the eastern zone and southern zones are served by Colorado River water.

And uh I want to state that the entire service area can be supplied with groundwater from our groundwater allowances.

So before we get it, we're gonna break part of the city into the zones and drill down and talk specifically about where the water comes from that supplies these zones.

But we first want to do if you go to the next slide, uh a little refresher on units because we use this archaic turn, and all the slides going forward are gonna be using this term acre feet.

And a lot of people don't know what that means, but when we're talking in in water supply and talking about water portfolio, um we use this term acre foot.

We just that's just what we use.

When we're talking about flow through a plant, it's it's MGD.

But when we're talking about just supply of water, it's acre feet.

So I can visualize an acre, one foot deep of water, and that's pretty easy.

But a lot of people, they they can't really visualize what an acre looks like.

So we have our football fueled graphic.

So an acre foot is essentially the full width of a of the playing surface, 160 feet, and it it doesn't stretch all the way down to the other goal line uh of a hundred yards, it stops at about the 10-yard line, but it's almost a whole football field, one foot deep, that's an anchor foot of water.

So, how does that relate to our our customers and our usage?

Well, let's break that down further.

If you look at the median residential household, they use 6,000 gallons a month or 72,000 gallons a year.

So four and a half of those households could be supplied for an entire year by this football field full of water.

Now, we're gonna be talking in terms of thousands of acre feet.

That's what our supply consists of.

So if you just look at simply a thousand acre foot, that would be 4.5 times a thousand, that would be 4,500 median households.

And what I like to do is the median is one number, but what's a what's our average use for residential households?

And that's about 9,000 gallons a year.

So that would translate into about 3,000 households, uh, even at the average.

So that gives you a little bit of uh perspective in terms when we start throwing these acre feet numbers around how many households this really serves.

So now let's break down the system.

We'll start with the city zone.

So we're sitting in the city zone.

This is on project, it's part of the Salt River project area, that's why it's called on project.

And the surface water in this part of town is treated at the Valvista water treatment plant.

It's managed by the city of Phoenix, but we co-own that with Phoenix.

We have 90 MGD of capacity.

So, in terms of how much water do we have for the city zone, uh, I'll just point you to the total.

That's what's important.

We won't get into some of these footnotes because it's complicated.

But we essentially have 62,000 acre foot of water a year available on project.

Now the good news is our organic demand in the city zone is only about 33,000 to 35,000 acre feet a year, so quite a bit below the amount of water we have.

Uh and we're built out for the most part.

We could go vertical in places, but essentially we're built out in the city zone, so we have a lot of excess capacity, and that has nothing to do with the Colorado River, Salt River project is the Salt River and the Verde River systems, it's all in-state water.

And the system in state right now, uh, the capacity both on the Verde and the Salt are about 57% as of today.

Sorry, could what did you say?

The um we don't use our capacity of SRP water.

Where are we at?

Is that in the chart?

No, but we use about 33,000 to 35,000 acre feet.

So we have a lot of headroom up to that 62,000.

Now, SRP has declared shortages in the past.

In 2003, 2004, they declared a shortage and and they significantly cut back supplies.

But even with that significant cutback, we still had headroom above and beyond our our demand in this part of town.

And so what's that mean?

Like where does that what's that mean for the the amount we're not using?

Mayor, council member go forth.

It just means we don't we don't order that water.

Okay.

So we we forecast for the whole year how much water we're gonna need, and it's like I said, it's very static in the city zone because we're built out, we don't see much of a fluctuation.

And then on a day-to-day basis, we look at weather patterns, we have our utility control room, it's a 24-7 operation.

Those guys continually monitor the water or the weather by the hour.

In fact, they fight with each other because they all have their favorite weather channel that they file follow.

And they debate and then they have a consensus, and then they call SRP and actually they call Phoenix because Phoenix operates the plant you're looking at, and then we put our order in for the next day or for that day.

Okay.

And there's no banking or any, I mean, okay.

And we only use that about 50% of that water, because that's just what we need to service the households in that region for which SRP is the main provider.

Exactly.

Okay.

That's exactly it.

So it's a different story if we go to east of the Eastern Canal.

So now we're off project.

And I should one final thing I'll say about on project lands.

So we have excess capacity, but we can't move that water to any degree over to these other zones you're looking at because it was over a century ago, all of the landowners, the farmers in the on project lands, they're the ones who came up with the money and they finance all the infrastructure that makes up the Salt River project and the storage and the conveyance structures.

So all of the benefits stay with the land.

So it's a it's a unique situation.

It just it's a water supply that stays with the land.

Now these areas are much different.

This is uh, and you you'll see when Jesse starts talk talking about the graphs that show how we've accumulated supply over the years, but this is supply that Mesa has had to build on its own.

And so this table shows you really how our supply is built of Colorado River.

The biggest piece is the 43,000 five hundred acre foot of uh municipal and industrial.

That's our that's our biggest share of Colorado River water.

And then we have various tribal leases that are smaller components.

That adds up to a little over 53,000 acre feet.

Now, our organic demand uh currently, and I say currently because we are still growing in that part of Mesa, so that ticks up every year.

And we're about 58,000 acre foot, which is greater than what you see in the table, but how that's made up is we have about over 8,000 acre foot of water we get Colorado River water through the exchange with the Hilo River Indian community.

So that takes up our our total amount we have at our disposal to 61,000 acre foot.

So we actually exceed the organic demand right now in in east the eastern zone and southern zone by a few thousand acre foot.

Now that's we're gonna be challenged when we get these big cuts.

So with that, we need to look at what are our additional supplies and backup supplies.

So we'll let's look at that.

Chris, can I interrupt?

Sorry.

Um, was there any discussion?

I'm trying to remember about um tying in the SRP canal system into the CAP to be able to move water to the um our in Mesa in particular, the the Southeast region.

Right.

So Mayor Freeman, Council Member Duff.

Um there is a it's called the SCIF.

It's a project, it's a pump station and a pipeline that um will be able to lift water from the SRP, the South Canal, up a bluff and dump it into the CAP canal.

But we can't use so on project water, even though that infrastructure will allow us to physically do that.

We can't do that.

Why we would participate in that project is for NCS water, which is which I'm gonna describe here shortly, which is behind Roosevelt Dam, and then our participation in Bartlett and creating a new dam there.

So Bartlett uh extra storage that was created and the Roosevelt uh Lake NCS water, that's all separate from on project that was done year later, and we paid for that.

Mesa paid for that.

So we could we can use that anywhere in the city.

So we can take those since we're partners in paying for the projects.

We can take the water, our portion of the water, and use it and move it to the southeast.

Right, and that's significant too.

And you'll see those those volumes we'll talk about.

So these are the four additional water supplies, and I'm gonna walk through each of those uh individually, but uh before I do, um I've covered a lot already.

I'll pause and see if there's any other questions.

Okay, so we'll go through one by one, but um Mr.

Adams, Mr.

Summers, you have any questions so far.

Not so far, Mayor.

Thank you.

Okay, before we look at so far, thank you.

Before we look at these individually, just listing them up.

So these are our additional supplies.

We have the Hilo River Indian Community Water Exchange, which we already receive about 8,000 acre foot a year through that exchange.

Um we're gonna grow that with the reuse pipeline, so we'll talk about that.

We have the new conservation space, which is NCS water, and that's that's additional flood storage space that we created in the 1990s.

We'll talk about that.

And then we have um some underground options.

We have our our normal annual allocation of groundwater pumping that's part of our assured water supply, as well as um we have a lot of underground stored credits, and we'll talk about all these individually right now.

So we'll start with the Hila River Indian Community Water Exchange.

It's a five to four ratio exchange where we deliver from our water reclamation plants, reuse or reclaim water to the Gila River Indian community in an exchange through that ratio.

Now, one of the best features of this exchange is is the cost.

So the water we get, the Colorado River water we get through the exchange, we only pay the the for the energy, the pumping rate it's called to move that water because that's embedded in that water that the Heel River India community has, and that's only at this year $85 an acre foot.

And our M and I cap water that we order also this year is $365 an acre foot.

So it's significantly cheaper.

So by increasing how much water we get through that exchange is a is a big deal when it comes to reducing our budget or keeping our budget in check.

So the agreement itself allows for us to deliver to the community $29,400 acre foot per year, and then through that five to four ratio, that means we would get up to $23,520 acre foot.

So we have a lot of room to grow in this exchange agreement because this year we're only getting 8,000 of that 23,000.

The reuse pipeline will take us up to closer to 16 or 17,000 acre foot, but we still have room that we can grow.

And we we have ideas we've looked at in the master plan, and we continue to explore ways to keep more wastewater in the system, treated here, and then move it down to the community to continually increase the amount we get through that exchange, both because of the availability and the cost.

So the agreement allows up to 23.

Does the agreement also cap the price?

How does the price work?

Um, mayor, council member go forth the so the price changes every year, just like the the price of cap water.

So it's we're paying the pumping charge.

So actually it went down.

I'm glad you asked that, because last year, I believe it was $95 an acre foot.

It all depends how the cap is procuring energy.

And they started shifting to where they're getting their energy.

Some energy prices came down.

Um, net gas became a bigger uh piece of the equation, and because energy prices came down, the price per acre foot for us dropped from 95 to 85.

But the MI cost never goes down.

That keeps going up.

That's a rule you can take to the bank.

Thank you.

Can you can't sorry, can you just tell us what M and I means?

Oh, municipal and industrial.

It's just it's a classification.

Thank you.

Chris, I think your point on electricity, I remember some other briefings for CAP is about 12 million dollars a month to pump that water all through their system.

It's a big so that that cost shared is through all everybody who receives that water.

That's why you have different rates at different times.

It's the biggest energy.

The CAP is the largest energy consumer in the state of Arizona.

Until maybe some AI insulation will surpass it.

We'll see.

Hopefully they're in Buckeye.

Hope Mayor Osborne or heard that.

Mayor have a quick quick comment.

Yes, Mr.

Adams.

Um I'm glad Mr.

Hassard is pointing out all the various costs, and uh, those particularly that we have no control over in acquisition of water because these are in many other things either.

These are things out of our control that we have to deal with every time we look at utility rates.

So I appreciate the depth that he's going into here.

Thank you.

You bet.

Go ahead, Chris.

Okay, our next category of additional supplies is new conservation space.

Uh you can see the upper picture is the original Roosevelt Dam.

So construction started, I think, in 1906.

It was completed in in 1911.

In the mid-90s, though, Mesa participated with some other stakeholders on a big project, and what it did is it raised the dam by 77 feet.

It cladded the whole thing in concrete, it uh built new emergency spillways.

Um that project was it was significant for Mesa because it added for us 41,000 acre foot of storage, which is a lot.

Now, because it's storage that's in a flood space behind a dam, the way it works in practice is more like a checking account.

So when you get a really good winter like we had a couple of years ago, um we hit maximum capacity in the reservoir in a filled into that flood space.

So we had our account of 41,000 acre foot filled out.

That's how much water we had at our disposal that we could order.

And remember, this water can be used, it doesn't have to be used on project, even though it's on the Salt River system.

We can use it in East Mesa, where we're gonna get these cuts with the Colorado River.

And then each year, as we use some, our account drops, and then each year, regardless of whether we use it or not, evaporation debits that account, and it keeps coming down.

And we could take it all the way to zero.

So right now, currently we have about in our account about 30,000 acre foot, so we have about three quarters of of the total amount we have that a bit available to us.

Now that's in practice, and how it works in the eyes of the state through our 100-year assured water supply is because the lake levels fluctuate, they look at that as we certainly don't have 41,000 acre foot a year in reality to use because the lake levels are gonna fall and then fill up when we get a good snowpack.

Um so there's a formula that they use by looking at decades and decades of of hydrologic records and how the the lake ebbs and flows and the calculations uh break down to where in our hundred year shorter water supply, in in their view, we could use about 12,500 acre foot every year and sustainably use that amount of water for 100 years without any problem.

So if you go to our 100-year shared water supply, we can use 12,500 acre foot of NCS water that we paid for in the 1990s, and that's a lot of water.

So if you go back to the units refresher that we did earlier in the presentation, if we can we can serve 4,500 customers per thousand acre foot, you know, we're at 50,000 residential households.

Just this little backup supply of water can furnish.

So it's really significant.

And then Bartlett Dam, we'll mention briefly at the very end, but so it's in the same family as this.

Bartlett Dam is on the Verde River.

It's building a new dam, creating a new flood storage pool that is above and beyond what exists today.

Mesa is a stakeholder in that.

We're paying for part of that, so we would create, we won't get 41,000 acre foot with this project just frankly because there's so much interest and there's so many stakeholders this time.

But we'll get we're hoping to get somewhere between 10 to 13,000 acre feet to add to that 41,000.

So those two supplies to be at our disposal to be used uh on the off-project areas, it's really significant.

Did you say we were gonna get about 10,000 extra acre feet once the dam is raised?

Correct.

Uh Mayor, Councilmember Taylor, 10 to 13,000.

So then could we in theory say that we could tick the 12,500 average that's been accrued over research and time to 22,500 since we're gonna have or we even half of that 17?

Well, what we'll do because the 41,000, you're you're dividing it by around three and a half, 3.5 to get down to your 12.

So if you take our 13 and divider by a three and a half, we'll be down like 3,000.

Okay.

So we would naturally tick that amount up as well as our average now.

We'll go from 12,500 to maybe something north of 15,000.

Okay.

Okay.

Chris, what's our annual usage of water?

Abouty-eight uh million gallons a day, which is it's about 97 to 98 uh thousand acre foot, almost a hundred thousand acre foot.

That's citywide.

Right, this was actually.

It's about fifty-eight thousand acre foot on the in the CAP service areas.

Okay.

Uh, Chris, before we go on, um what is the current status?

We've really had you know kind of a dry year this year.

There hasn't been much snowpack.

Um do you expect declining amount of water in this reservoir?

Or is there any or is that a question for SRP or whoever manages this?

Right, Mayor and Councilmember Duff, uh, it's dry widespread across the West this this time.

We've been fortunate we're in some prior years, the Colorado River really had some minimal snow packs, didn't do didn't fare very well, but SRP was very robust, just the way the the fronts can came through the southwest.

But this year, uh the SRP service area, it's been holding steady.

Okay.

Um it's not great.

There's a couple fronts coming through here in the coming days.

Um it's still gonna be below average, I would say.

It's it's not last year, it was a bad year with SRP.

Um because if you go back just three years, we fill we filled the lake to full pool and then went into the flood space to fill up our NCS account.

Um it really varies year to year.

This year is gonna be below average, though, I think to answer your question.

And certainly on the Colorado River system, it's gonna be below average.

Yeah.

And I I I think it's uh general knowledge, but I just want to say for anybody listening, that what we really depend on for our water supply is from the snow pack more so than the rain.

So if you hear, you know, see that Arizona's getting a lot of rain, but very little snow in the high country, that's affecting the you know, the on project water or and likewise for the Colorado River.

Right.

Jesse, could you go back to that first slide that showed the map of the system?

While they're looking at the map, I did want to be have offer some encouragement, Jen, and this they told me this will fluctuate, but I did the SRP watershed tour uh I think three weeks ago now.

And at that time when we were flying over the Mazatal Wilderness, our hydrologist said, right now we're having to release water out of the Verde River, and he said the lack of snow, it didn't come down heavy as snow, he said, but we had like misty rain in the high country, and that including what we got in the valley.

Again, this was that time put us at one percent over the maximum allowance.

So he said, right now we're actually doing quite well.

He said that will change, but it was encouraging to see that at that point we just had an abundance, but that was for Bartlett, horseshoe, and the Verde.

Yeah.

Yeah, we had a good fall.

You remember some of the big rains we had in the fall, and that that was beneficial to the soil moisture, which is good.

And then any snow that comes after that, because you have good soil moisture, it's not gonna just get soaked in like a sponge.

It'll it'll stack up and accumulate a little easy more easy.

So that's also a good sign.

But on the Colorado River, you can see uh on this map, lower basin, upper basin, it's it's in the upper basin, it's where that snowpack is important because that's the headwaters of the Colorado and all its tributaries, and that's where you want um a real healthy snowpack that would result in good runoff.

And right now it's it's bel it's below average.

Um it's not looking the best.

It's probably worse than but than last year, but it there's still a little bit of winter left, so we'll have to see how that shapes up.

All right, let's go to the groundwater slide.

So our third source of backup water is groundwater, and what I'll point you to in the table, the table shows how it breaks down, but the total amount is just under 10,000 acre foot.

So in our 100-year shared water supply, um, in the view of the state, we can use sustainably over 100-year period uh about 10,000 acre foot.

And there's two major components to that.

Um the first one is our groundwater allowance.

So if you see that really big number, the 467,000 acre foot, that is through this comprehensive basin-wide model that DWR develops and manages, and it's and it's it's the whole area, it's the whole sub basin, it's not just Mesa.

And they do that because they don't want to look at individual cities in a vacuum.

They have to look comprehensively at the whole aquifer and how it ties together so that we're not overlapping and double counting water.

So the aquifer for Mesa over the next hundred years, that 467,000, that's what they they feel we could pump over a hundred years and not have any adverse impacts on the groundwater table.

So in the with a hundred year shared water supply, they just take that and simply divide it by a hundred, and they get an annual amount.

Now the other component is what's called incidental recharge.

So no system, no distribution system treatment system is is water tight.

In fact, you have systems in in parts of the country like the Midwest where you have 30% plus leakage from your system.

We're mid-single digits, so we have to do much better here in Arizona, and we do.

So with our 2500 miles of pipeline, um, and our total demand of about 98,000 acre foot, they the state looks at Mesa as having a uh a leakage rate, if you will, of a little over five percent.

So that five percent on the total demand um equates to um 5286 acre foot per year.

So that with our regular groundwater allowance is just shy of 10,000 acre foot a year.

We try to pump maybe half of that in a typical year.

So we we pump way under because we want to preserve that groundwater as as much as possible.

But it's a backup source.

We could pump a little bit more, and in times of shortage on the Colorado, we could even direct some of that additional pumping to the to the eastern and southern zones.

When you say leakage, can you explain that in terms of are you meaning from the pipes or just seeping into the ground?

Okay, right, Mayor Councilmember Taylor.

So it would be from uh pipe joints, um, small leaks that you have in the system, you're gonna have a certain percentage, and and we're about five percent, which is really good.

Um, as a in the state of Arizona, as part of the 1980 groundwater management act, um water providers are required to be under 10 percent, and we're well below 10 percent.

It as that water is seeping out of our pipes, does it in in effect go back into an aquifer over time?

So we could say we're losing it at an initial level, but we're kind of almost regaining it at a later time frame.

Yes, and that's why we get credit for it.

Good to know.

It's nice that that it's a benefit.

Right.

You know, they don't want you leaking it, but when you do, like it's yeah, it's nice to get a break once in a while.

Um I'm trying to understand.

So when you don't use all your allocation, it's just gone.

How does that work?

Well, no, though, so the 400 would have okay.

Here's what happens.

So the 467, that is this large bucket of water that we have over 100 years based on the modeling at the time.

But then if we say we overuse, because it's really just an average, we're not we don't use the 4679 and then we're cut off.

Um, or plus plus the incentive, we don't use the 9965 and then we're cut off.

We could use 15,000 for five years in a row, but then the next time we go to update our assured water supply, the total amount shrinks, so then the amount per year would shrink.

Okay, thank you.

So we're not doing ourselves, or we're doing ourselves a disservice if we overpump when we don't need to.

And then um also on the groundwater topic is long-term storage credits.

And so this table shows you first of all, how many we have.

We have um over half a million acre feet of long-term storage credits.

And this shows you exactly where they come from.

The picture that you're looking at is CRUSP, and we have about 88,000 acre foot stored in CRUSP.

And but most of our storage is in the RWCD, GSF stands for the groundwater savings facility.

So there's two ways you can earn long-term storage credits.

One is you can direct it to a large recharge basin, like you see in the picture, and then that water percolates on the aquifer, and how much water we send there, that's measured, and we get those credits per acre foot.

Uh another way is to offset groundwater pumping, and that's how we got the RWCD credits.

So years ago, when we had plenty of excess cap water and the population of Mesa was much, much lower and commercial was much, much lower.

We had water that we knew we wouldn't use, so Mesa bought some of that water and directed it into the uh Roosevelt Water Conservation District system, their canals, because they normally pump groundwater to service their irrigation for irrigation to serve their farm fields and people um doing residential flood irrigation.

But because we gave them service water, that replaced a lot of groundwater pumping they had to do.

So it left that water in the ground.

So in the view of the state, the water that was saved underground because we gave them surface water, um, we get credited that for the future.

So it stayed in the ground for us because the irrigation still happened, but it was done with surface water.

So you can see that was um that was a good strategy that Mesa employed back then because it amounted to over 400,000 acre feet.

And then to put this in perspective, because we have 557,000 acre foot of long-term storage credits, and the the natural demand right now in in the parts of Mesa served by Colorado River is 58,000.

We have about 10 years worth of just long-term storage credits that we can use.

So these four backup sources I just covered were pretty significant.

And before Jesse gets into some slides that really look at over time how our demand compares to our supplies, I'll I'll pause and see if you have any questions.

On long-term storage credits, um of our large users have to bring them to the table in their development, you know, the mega users, right?

Where we can't supply uh what they want in water.

So they have to go to the market and get the long-term storage credits.

Do they buy is this managed through some entity, or they go to any one of these entities, or do we sell them, or how does that work?

So, right.

So they do go to um, there's a couple entities, uh Vidler Water Company is one.

There's an entity um called GROWs, which is Heal River Indian community working in partnership with SRP.

So there's and there might be there's a couple more that I'm less familiar with.

But so we direct, and there's only I believe about three of the very large water users that um trigger the ordinance to where they're forced to go by long-term storage credits.

So we because they're not in that business, they're in whatever high-tech business they're in.

We I just we direct them, I guess is the word I'm looking for.

We we direct them to that resource, and um, and then we help answer questions.

And then once they're working with that resource, um, and we tell them we do a forecast over three years uh in terms of how much water per the ordinance they have to go bring to the table.

They can't get it from our portfolio.

So we give them the volume, they work with the third party, and then the third party sometimes will call us with questions too.

So we're all working together in a sense.

And at the end of the day, um once the the private company who's required to get the storage credits obtains them from the third party, then the third party uh, I guess for lack of a better word, deeds them over to the city.

And then so we we pump the credits for them, but we're keeping track um of their credits versus our own portfolio.

It's separate accounting.

Okay.

I hope that answers your question.

Yeah, and then how about the location of the water?

So let's say the um user is in a certain location, and we exercise the long-term storage credits.

Are we taking it from groundwater in that area or how how is the water sourced for to exercise the long-term storage?

It depends on the third party they're using where they have the water.

Um, for instance, um, I think Fiddler has most of their water with um RWCD, if I'm not mistaken.

So we would use a well that's within the RWCD groundwater savings facility because that's that's what's required.

And we would pump it, track it, and then we just each year we we just do that accounting.

That's good.

That therefore we're not depleting, putting too much pressure, especially long-term storage credits are pretty much in the Southeast Mesa, the large data centers and such um down there, right?

And so I'm glad that we're not extracting the water from just right there, because it's a lot of pressure on the water table.

Um like I said, there's only three customers that are doing this that are that big a water users where the ordinance requires them to go get their own water.

But I will say this that because the long-term storage credits are not cheap and their businesses and they have a business to run, they've changed how they operate their business to use less water, at least to the point where they don't have to even give us those credits because it's not gonna they're they're using less water, I guess is what I'm trying to say, to where um both to our surprise and um relief because to your point it's it's less stress on the aquifer.

Um a lot of cities are pr uh requiring them to use loop systems.

I don't exactly know how that is different from what we have.

Um I don't know if I know we're getting a little bit off where you are right now on topic, so we can discuss it later if you like.

Well, our ordinance and just the backdrop of the drought in general has changed companies to, for instance, and and I can I can name Google because they were they were very public in how they released um and announced the fact that they completely re-engineered their facility to go from uh water intensive cooling, HVAC, to um electric, electric driven.

Now it puts more pressure on the grid, and that's a whole nother related problem that needs to be figured out over time.

But uh they went from potentially using a lot of water to using very little water for the for the footprint of their facility, uh they use relatively very little water.

So facilities are are taking cues from what's going on right now, the back the the overall backdrop, and they're changing how they design their facilities to get away from very water-intensive insulations.

So a closed loop system, what is that?

I've heard that referred to.

Well, you just run the what the same water um through the chillers multiple times.

You try to limit evaporation.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but what you there's a limit, there's an upper limit to how many times you can circulate uh that same slug of water because then you start to increase the salinity, and then it becomes more corrosive to the equipment.

And then that's returned to us when they decide to dispose of it.

It does.

We get that, and it it's treated at a reclamation facility, and then we have that to be used mainly for our exchange with Heel River India community.

Okay, good.

So the water users are using all I'm familiar with one that they are doing a closed loop and then returning it when they can't use it any longer.

So that's to make your your facility more efficient, is you can run the water through a loop as many times as as you can.

Palo Verde nuclear power plant probably runs water several times through the system before it becomes um too saline, and then they push it out to their their large lined reclare their evaporation ponds.

Yeah.

Um I'll just make a statement.

I know I'm getting off topic, but I've from my understanding of AI um data centers, they they need to work on liquid cooling.

Um they run too hot that the energy doesn't satisfy the the heat from those servers to work at that level.

Um so we'll see how that goes.

Um I know we have we have our ordinances and such to protect what we have, so we'll just leave it at that.

Okay.

I have one quick question actually to piggyback off of something that Jen made a point of.

Because we're focusing so much on water preservation, it and this might be better directed at you, Scott, but do we have any um rules or in place to say to upcoming data centers or current data centers that use so much water and energy that they need to use like R22 uh or some sort of free on base coolant for systems because there are opportunities with closed loop cooling, or you can run that material over and over again before it finally runs out much faster or much longer than water.

Or propane, you know, the propane-based coolants.

Yeah, we um mayor, council member no, um to that point.

We we certainly, and and as Chris alluded to, the Google as an example, um, they were making their decisions in Mesa right as the industry was starting to transition more from water cooled to air-cooled, and and and so I think you see the industry itself when it's looking at these different sources.

Uh, they're very they they see what kind of feedback they're getting from local communities, and so I I give them credit that the industry evolves um a lot based on that.

So they realize the concerns about um water use um as particularly in the southwest, but I think even their Virginia and Texas locations, I mean, water is an issue everywhere, right?

And so they they've um they migr migrated a lot of these facilities over to air-cooled facilities, but as was alluded to, then you know it's it's whack-a-mole.

And then you have the energy um issues and the problems of that the strain that that puts on on the grid.

So I think we're gonna continue to see a lot of evolution on that as we've discussed here.

Data centers aren't going away.

They're a fact of life uh for technology and they're needed and and um and like we said, Mesa's certainly done our part on on that, but I think the industry is going to continue to evolve, so it's gonna so we'll be encouraging um uh anyone who's located here or anyone who would want to locate uh under our new um guidelines that they're looking at the latest and best technology to to be as uh conservation and and sustainable ability as much as possible on water and energy.

Mr.

Haretti has a question.

Chris, um with all these uh you know, storage credits and the groundwater and conservation spaces it there it's a regional effort, right?

Uh as far as partnerships.

Um I think it's I've always tried to wrap my head around like what's the accountability of because we do I think a really great job in conserving and banking and getting all these credits, but when you have maybe other partners that are not necessarily doing that their part, that's that's like the the future of uh uh the water supply is is very dependent on this regional basis that everybody kind of looks at this in in a serious manner.

Um and so and you hear the debates of you know uh you know our culture out in the on the you know west side of the states and and uh them pumping out you know water that they didn't really have and other partners are as well, right?

Not just our culture.

So what's the accountability measures of you know, particularly other cities, right?

Uh that uh you know, we are we have all these credits, but if for say Scottsdale is mismanaging their water supply and they're running out of water, like what's are they not gonna get the water for the you know the 300,000 people or 400,000 people that live in Scottsville?

So like what that's my fear in the future, right?

As far as we're like everybody is dependent on this managing water uh portfolios to to the best that they can, but as far as you know the future can you touch upon kind of the regional aspects of you know the the how many partners are are engaged in all this and then the accountability measures that you know you know other partners or are there that that there are for you know making sure we have a supply here at least in the region, right?

So sure.

Uh Mayor Councilmember Haretti.

I would say so a couple things to add to to what you're or to how to address your what you're asking is there's guardrails in place through the 1980 groundwater management act in terms of how water's pumped, and those guardrails, at least provider by provider, um, are gonna constrain, they're not gonna let you run wild with with pumping.

Um you're gonna have constraints both through the the groundwater management act and your own assured water supply.

So every every provider has is a unique situation.

That's why we're really drilling down today to show you, you know, how we fare here in Mesa and how we're set up, how we've prepared.

Every city's doing the same thing with with their respective councils or their water boards if they have a board instead of a council.

Um and then through Amla, it's a partnership.

So we just had our AMA management board meeting.

Um I'm a member of that yesterday.

There's 10 cities under AMWA.

All the cities have these groundwater challenges.

We have SRP water, we have Colorado River water, we all have the same challenges of trying to manage our systems while facing these cuts.

And then along with on the topic of the cuts, we're all working in concert, not just as water providers, but with CAP, SRP, um, of course, the tribal communities can't leave them out.

We're all in this together.

So with the draft EIS on the table, and um a lot of these alternatives that I would say we don't agree with because they haven't under the NEPA, they really haven't looked at all the the alternatives they should have.

They're leaving some important things out, and we're all collectively and individually gonna be pushing back.

Um the common period, I believe ends March 2nd for the draft EIS.

The intent would be to have the final EIS done by the summer.

So I guess going back to tying this up a little more neatly in terms of an answer, we all have our guardrails.

Um, so we all have our restrictions there, and then we're all working together uh at the same time to try to position Arizona uh in a better light than what's portrayed right now in the in the draft EIS.

And we're all and then all the environmental impact statement.

And then I would take that even further.

Uh going forward in the future, we're at the table all of us for Bartlett Lake and race in Bartlett Dam, possibly advanced purification, um water importation, uh perhaps desalination on the sea of court.

We're all working together to the future too.

So it's managing the present and then also working together to the future.

But we we recognize each other's challenges and and work together well.

And I think all in all, everybody's a responsible player in this.

Mayor and um councilmember Haredi, I would just add too, and um, I know Miranda's in the back, but this is why you see cities with senior water rights like we do engage at the legislature because we can't allow the short-term desire to water down some of these groundwater regulations to offset the 45 years of tremendous work since the 1980 ground and groundwater uh management act was put in place.

I mean, it was it was you know, you look back and you're like, man, they it's amazing that they nailed it the way that they did in 1980 and put in such a forward-thinking policy, and so there is a lot of pressure from housing and others to try to water that down in communities, some here in the East Valley and certainly in the West Valley, uh, for the quick fix of uh trying to keep up with growth.

And certainly, you know, this has pitted that discussion we hear about so much about the desire to get more housing online versus the realities of the restraint that we've shown that's allowed for good water management.

So um, you know, the the mayor's been involved in this and his then the role at MWA for for years, but it's so important that cities like ours are at the table, and we are um both um individually as the city of Mesa, but through associations like Amwa, uh Arizona Municipal Water Users Association and others who um you know really are down at the Capitol talking to legislators and the governor's office about the need that um we get it, we get that the constraints and the need for additional housing uh in this state, but we have to do it responsibly, and we have to do it in a way that still preserves uh the sanctity of what the the groundwater management act uh brought to this state.

And so you're gonna continue to see that push and pull as Arizona just continues to grow.

So we're we're gonna have to stay vigilant every year about um trying to make sure that those water supplies are protected.

I'll just uh Mr.

Adams, Mr.

Summers, any questions.

No, Mayor, I have none.

It's it's been a very informative presentation, but uh he's covering the details very well.

So I'll just add after everything that's been said so far, that's why we have a 100-year assured water supply.

That's the guardrail for every municipality.

If you can't meet those uh metrics, and guess what?

You don't get that 100-year designation, and consequently your bucks of water get a little smaller.

Uh I'm sure Kathy is just anxious to come up here and talk about it because she's our water person on the inner govs as well as Miranda.

But overall, you know, when we talk about the long-term storage credits, that's like a savings account, right?

And when we withdraw that water out of there, my question is like any savings account, can we put water back in to that long-term storage credit and have that still available and then have the reuse and use of that water available?

Right.

So Mayor Freeman, if you look at that total 557,000 um 84 acre feet, right?

Each one of these that we we use and we pop out of the ground is extinguished, it's gone.

But then it doesn't prevent us from putting more water in the ground.

So we're doing we're doing that this year, we're gonna put more water in grass.

So we're not this year, we're not gonna take any of our own long-term storage credits.

So we continued to add to it.

So it wasn't long ago we had, I remember seeing a number of 540,000 acre food.

So we keep building that um through grass.

But even with the exchange agreement with the Gila River Indian community, when we turn on the Central Mesa Ruse pipeline, that's taken reclaimed water from Northwest, it's moving it um across towards grass, but then it makes a hard right-hand turn and it goes down to the community.

But there's days where if you get a few days of rain, or if there's um some issue that they have and they they call us up and say we don't need any more water today, then what we do is then we put the water in grasp like we have in the past.

So, but the nice thing is if um if our water was available to the community and because of weather or some other reason, and they told us to hold it back, we still get credit as if we delivered it to them.

So it's like a double bonus because we're recharging the water, earning credits, and then we're gonna still get water out of the exchange because we had it available and they just they just didn't need it.

But yes, we we do continue to add to our credits.

Um, but when we get if we get a severe enough cut um each year, we're gonna pull some, we're gonna use some of those, and those will be gone as we use them.

But there are gonna be times when we still add to it.

Good.

Uh continue on in your presentation.

Will you remind me real quick?

Granite reef underground storage project.

So is it's important that we covered all these different components because Jesse's gonna go over some graphs that now tie all these components that I just talked about.

He's gonna tie them all together.

He's gonna go back in time and show the history of our demand here in the city, and along with that, the history of how we've where we started with our with our water supplies and then how we've built them up over time.

And specifically, we're not gonna talk about on project, we're gonna talk about the Colorado River parts that are served by the Colorado River and Mesa.

Okay, thank you, Chris.

Uh, mayor counsel.

So what we're gonna go through here are some graphs.

There'd be three graphs.

Um, I'll just start explaining what you're seeing on the graph here.

So on the left, you see those are the acre feet, and the solid blue, dark blue line, that is the actual demand.

Uh going back to 1983.

Um, the Brown Road water treatment plant was came online in 1985.

So kind of before that, there was no real service water availability.

So that's about as far back as we went in the history of this.

So you see the demand and it kind of increases, and in the 90s, you see a really steep kind of uptick in the demand.

That that was from a lot of obviously adding a lot of customers back then.

The use per customer too was kind of climbing.

And then when you get to the 2000s, about 2004, it was about the peak, and then you see uh a really kind of flatlining.

And what's going on there is the city was still adding customers in those eastern and southern zones, but the through technology changes in the plumbing code, the use per customer has been, we've been seeing a decrease of if you go back to 2003, 2004, that was kind of the peak use per customer.

And since then, we've been seeing that kind of drop off.

So more efficient fixtures and toilets and zero scaping and things like that.

So even though we were adding customers, you know, since 2004, um, we've barely surpassed the demand in 2004, just in the last couple of years.

You see, it's kind of started to tick back up because you know the use per customer is going down, but the number of customers is has always been going up.

So that takes you to present 2025, and then you see these these big circles.

There's the yellow circles and the orange circles.

So this is from our our master plan, our master plan was completed in 2025.

So they they took the demand and they projected out the yellow circles is the uh median, so that's the 50th percentile.

So what they do is they look at all the vacant parcels that are remaining in the eastern part of the city, and they look at the general plan and what that area was uh planned for, and then they look at what so if it was planned for residential, they look at what existing residential uses, and then they apply that demand to the vacant parcels and they project that out.

So if all of the vac if we don't change the general plan and we don't change the zoning and it builds per the median customer, the yellow line is what you could expect to see out to build out, and in the master plan, they they pegged build out at 2040.

Obviously, we don't predict the real estate market, so that's just an arbitrary number.

But if you just think of in 2040, that's when they projected the vacant parcels would fill out.

Uh the orange circles, that is what they call the moderate growth, and that's the 75th percentile.

So that's that would be if for some reason we we got larger water users that that occupied those remaining vacant parcels.

So we don't think that's very likely, but you know, when you're master planning, you're trying to predict the future, so you want to kind of give it a boundary of likely to maybe it could get there.

Um so that that's looking at the demand curve.

Well, one thing I'll add on the demand real quick, Jesse, is uh we first did this graph two and a half years ago, so late 22, 23, and since then we've had actual data points for 2024 and 2025.

And so those are actual, and those are tracking right on the yellow, the lower line.

Yeah, good point.

Um so that's the demand, and then the stacked bars you see, those are the different um, we'll just call those flavors of surface water, so Colorado River water.

So the blue stack that would be the municipal and industrial.

So that's that currently at 43,000 and change acre feet that Chris talked about.

Uh, then the next bar down is peach color, I guess, whatever that color is, um, reddish color.

That is those other contracts that we have with uh leasing water from various uh Indian tribes, and then the bottom lighter color orange um is the Grick Exchange.

So that's the reclaim water that we sent to the Gila River.

Now you'll see in 2027 we have a slight uptick, and then in 2028, it takes a pretty big jump.

Uh, the way that so the Central Mesa Reuse pipeline is scheduled to be completed to turn on in the um the end of this month, early next month.

Um, so in the next couple weeks.

So we'll get about five months before we have to order the water.

So the tribe, they have to order their water um by October 1st.

So it's it's how much water we sent them up to September 1st.

So we don't we won't get a full year in 2026 that will go on to our 2027 order.

So there's only a slight uptick, but then by 2028, we'll be sending them a full year's worth of water, so then we'll get a full year's worth of water, if that makes sense.

Um, so that's when we'll really see the benefit for the central mesa reuse.

So you see that kind of jump up.

And the I'll add the reasoning for the order in which we stack these bars.

We we go with priority how we order it first, and you can see that the heel river exchange water in that peach color at the very bottom, that really forms the base because that's our cheapest water.

That's the $85 an acre foot.

So we front-load our order with cap, that's the very first part of our order, and then we whatever additional water we forecast we'll need, we build on top the more expensive water we build on top of that.

So that's how we designed the chart too.

When you talk about costs, Chris, uh, what do we pay for SRP water per acre foot?

Oh, it's down around 70 or less an acre foot.

70.

It's yeah, it's somewhere in that neighborhood.

Okay, so um, so we so we looked at a scenario here.

Um, it's one of the scenarios in the environmental impact statement, it's a 20% cut to the municipal and industrial, and then it would be they're also cutting some of the uh the Indian contracts, and it gets a little complex, but essentially it's about a 41% cut to some of those leased waters we have.

So you can see just looking from a surface water standpoint, um, and you look at kind of where the demand is to to the surface water availability.

And then I should point out too, as Chris talked about earlier, we would expect those cuts to go into effect in 2027, because that's when they are redoing the um the draft.

Um so you can see here there's there's obviously some gap between the surface water and what we project the demand to be.

So the next graph we're gonna show you is kind of bringing in those other flavors of water that Chris had talked about.

So the purple color, that is the um that's our groundwater allowance and incidental recharge.

That's that 9900 acre feet that Chris was talking about that that we can sustainably use.

And then the next color above that is a teal color.

Sorry, there's a lot of colors on this.

And I'm not good with colors, but um that's that new conservation space water, so that's that water that that was stored behind Roosevelt Dam.

And then finally on top of that is our long-term storage credits.

So as you can see with the 20% cut, we fill with uh the NCS water and then just our groundwater allowance and it's in our recharge, we would be able to meet demand um for the the moderate, and then um if we if the city were to develop to build out and the cuts were the Colorado cuts were to sustain, you can kind of see where what it would look like if we were to be the more 75th percentile growth.

You can see in those earlier years, like the next five years, we barely even need to use those additional sources with a 20% cut.

Now we don't know what the cut's gonna be.

It's just it's all being negotiated, it's a lot of talk.

There's more aggressive cuts that are they're listed as alternatives in the in the EIS under the NEPA.

So we think it's probably in reality gonna be more than 20%.

Um we don't know what that number is, but whatever additional amount of cut it is, just you look at that chart and then you can visualize uh the bars dropping, the last graph that Jesse showed where we drop a 20% and didn't stack anything on, just drop that even further, and then it's just using that much more supplies.

So then I'll go to the one next one, Jesse.

So you can see we're adding in just equal increments, those other supplies, but in those first initial years, we would lean on those backup supplies a lot less.

Um but then going forward, um, we're gonna need the backup supplies more, but then once you get out beyond 2030, now you're starting to get into that area where the work we're doing today with Bartlett and investigation into other sources, that's where that'll pay dividends.

Because if the cuts um are more severe and they stay sustained for some period of time, we're gonna need to continually build up that portfolio.

We've got to stay ahead of it by five years or 10 years.

We don't want to have it catch up to us in any given year.

So let's go to the next slide to talk about that.

Chris, I just really quick I uh the SRP, I think you called it a spec spec.

What did you call it?

Where we might use their water.

The skip where we that's really just a physical transfer station.

So we aren't planning on using their overage at any point and pumping that into our supply to feed the east side.

Uh is that what I'm hearing?

Right, we can't do that because uh the the water, the SRP on Project Water stays on project, it stays on the lands.

But the additional supplies we paid for to create Mesa paid for um the water at the space behind Roosevelt Dam, and then behind what will be the new pool behind the larger Bartlett Dam, that can be used.

That could be transferred through the skiff up into the Cap Canal.

Okay.

So we are kind of using, we're circumventing the direct by using Bartlett and the part behind Roosevelt.

Yeah, that's free to be used anywhere in the city.

Okay.

And we would because we have ample supplies here in the city zone, we would never use NCS and Bartlett water over here because we don't need it.

We have ample supplies, we would use it.

We would run it through the Brown Road plant with the signal view plant and serve those customers.

Okay.

I'm gonna be touring signal butte today.

I'm pretty excited.

Chris, I have a question about on the Colorado River supply, on the cap supply.

When I talked to some other cities and their expansions, um I said, you know, are you concerned about you know huge, huge uh expansions?

Um like, are you concerned about you know getting water into this area?

It's an area that um hasn't been agricultural, it's desert.

Are you concerned about water, having enough water to support you know the big development, the huge project?

Um and they said no, because we don't use our full allocation of water.

And over arching, um, there is a I've read many studies that that said, you know, the Colorado River is over allocated.

So if everybody took their max allocation, there isn't enough to go around, right?

We're in the mindset of uh the communities coming together and conserving as much as possible, and with that we're able to manage the water supply, right?

We're not being but is there any I mean how how does this work when the conflict of commun uh cities who say, well, we're not using our full amount, therefore we're expanding into the desert.

Yet we're seeing dramatic cutbacks, and we're in this, you know, conserving as much as we can and and trying to expand our water portfolio to compensate.

There's a little bit of I guess the um management area would resolve in the complex of being allowing that expansion and feeling that it's can be accommodated on the supply right.

I is that you know, the management area would be kind of the one kind of deciding like is fine.

You can take your allocation, you can do your project.

Well, Mayor Council Member Duff, what what's gonna create a ceiling on the whole big picture is gonna be the restrictions on CAP because that that's how not only Mesa but all the cities that rely on Colorado River, we get that water through the CAP system.

And the cut to the cap in 2027 is gonna limit how much water is available to all the water providers.

So I mean you're gonna have a ceiling just a hard ceiling created just by virtue of the of the cut.

So any city that maybe feels like they have designs to expand their water consumption by 50 percent for it's just not gonna happen.

They're gonna have to, we're all gonna have to live within those cuts unless we have backup supplies like we're talking about.

So you can see for Mesa, the chart that builds out every vacant parcel that the dotted yellow line, that's what we're tracking.

At the top of that, we've built out every parcel in Mesa.

So as far as we're concerned, um we're we're building and planning for our max amount.

But other other city, it's hard for me to talk to other cities because everybody's so different in terms of their setup, but I can say that the cuts to the cap is going to create that hard ceiling that determines how much water you can use from the Colorado River.

And uh the rural areas don't have management on their waters.

And it's a problem definitely in their areas.

Does that affect anything in the municipalities?

Um, or that's kind of an independent water system.

I mean, it does it does it have any where majority of our state is rural.

Um do non-management of rural areas affect our water supply in the metropolitan area.

Um Councilmember Duff, no, because uh they're just not connected.

Um we're we're in a large uh sub-basin, our aquifer, the East Salt River Subbasin, it's shared by Gilbert and Tempe and Scottsdale, and you can go south of us.

Um and it's shared by us.

But I mean, once you start getting out into rural areas, there's they're independent aquifers that really are not tied to us hydro hydrologically.

However, they do have active management areas now in South Southern Arizona as well as Western Arizona, they've just implemented those.

So they're br they're brand new.

Yeah.

Um why don't you continue on with our present Jesse?

So we're we're repping.

So how are we tying this all together?

So if the cuts, the impending cuts say they're a lot more severe and and they're sustained for some period of time.

We've for not just now, but going back a few or several years have been at the table uh looking at different future water supplies to continue to build those.

If you look at that graph and the the bar chart, continue raising those bars, so to speak.

So the one we've talked about already a few times today is Bartlett Dam, and that would add about 3,000 acre foot per year.

So the allocation would be maybe up to 13,000 acre foot.

But again, you do that adjustment factor, it would be about 3,000 per year in in the eyes of the state, and that that would be added to the 12,500 per year that we get from the NCS behind Roosevelt Dam.

Um also with the Hilo River any community exchange, as we talked about, we can receive up to 23,000 and change acre foot, but this year we're only gonna get about 8,000 with the reuse pipeline, we'll bump that up to 16 or 17,000.

So we still have room to find ways in the system.

Well, we've been looking at for a few years with the pump station and the force main and some some changes in the system.

How do we get more water to our reclamation plants, provide more reuse water, get that to the community, and then get more Colorado River water?

So that's something we're looking at.

Chris question.

Chris, with the CAP cuts, is that agreement affected?

Well, that's most likely it will be.

We think it will be.

Um it had went back and forth where maybe it was completely safe, then there might be a little cut.

We think at the end of the day, it'll be cut less than the municipal and industrial category, but we don't think it's completely safe.

And I imagine that's built into the contract, right?

When there are it is right.

Um one question on the um on the the exchange, the grick exchange.

What is the potential there?

I know we're uh exercising more and more and um with our expansion of our water treatment plant, and we we can do more.

I know other uh cities also are doing an exchange.

Is there a a limit, uh a ceiling to how much the GRIC needs and a limit to that exchange?

Or are are we is it very small and there's a huge amount or I don't know.

It's a good question, Mayor, Councilmember Dove.

So in just informal conversations we've had over the years with our partners there at the community, they the the amount of agricultural land that they have is is really expansive.

Okay.

And they've prefer to keep expanding that.

They lease it out to farmers.

So it's an income source for the community.

Um so the more le the more leases they do and and farms that they lease out, uh, the more revenue that they they take on.

So there's been even talks that they would consider, and I'm speaking for them now, um, but they would consider even amending the contract to raise the limit to get more water from us.

Because it's it's uh it's a good water supply, the reuse water we send down to them.

It it goes to a very strategic part in their community into the headwaters of their canal system.

So that just allows them to easily open up more fields for farming.

So they've talked about that if we got to a point, and I don't even know if we could get to a point to produce that much more reclaim water, but they would be they would entertain, at least with past conversations.

I don't know what the future holds.

Yeah, but of even increasing that.

Well, okay.

So we're nowhere near the the idea of reaching that capacity of the exchange.

Right, they would be more open to expanding that volume than decreasing it.

Okay.

I mean, they can't decrease it per contract because it's locked in for till 2100 and beyond.

Yeah.

And then Mesa is contributing or working with the city of Phoenix, I believe, on the, is it the 91st Avenue water treatment plant they have?

Right.

That's and and doing uh treating water into a a drinkable standard.

Um is that uh a viable uh is how far out is that?

What where are we on it?

That would be in the eight to ten year range.

It's so 91st Avenue is the biggest water reclamation plan in the state.

Five cities own that.

We're one of those cities.

Um we're at the table, at least from a feasibility standpoint.

Right now it's feasibility, it's just looking at what's the permitting look like, what's the technology look like, what's a partnership even look like?

So it's costing us very little money right now to just at least explore the feasibility of it.

But it it's taking the the reclaim water that does not go to the Palo Verde nuclear power plant and and through the Trace Rio sweatlands.

There's about 50 MGD that is in excess that could be directed through advanced treatment, uh brought to drinking water standards, and it would not come to Mesa, it would stay in Phoenix because that's in Tallison, that's 60 miles west of here.

So the way it would work between us and Phoenix is they would keep that purified water, and Mesa would get um that equivalent amount through an exchange with Phoenix.

We would get some of their SRP water, for instance.

Because it's going into their SRP system.

Okay, thanks.

But it's expensive and that needs to play out, and we would probably have to come back to you for more discussion and and input because it's gonna be a big price tag.

But then the federal government could also come to the table and pay for a big piece of that.

So so many things could change right now.

It's feasibility, and that's where we're at.

Well, it's in planning, so we're that may happen here in the near future.

And the state has recently finalized the regulations for what that technology lineup needs to look like to get to the level of treatment that uh in their view is safe.

Well, and Kudos Discos still, they've been doing this for quite a few years, so they have it dialed in.

They have the technology down to get it to that point, and they have they have plans also.

So Scottsdale, their their cap water treatment plant and their reclamation, their advanced purified plant is on sits on the same campus.

So they're gonna take the advanced purified water and pipe it a few hundred yards over into their water reservoir, the finished water reservoir.

That's their plan over the next few years.

Yeah.

We'll carry on.

Okay, and then additional uh measures we investigated through our master plan, what we're calling septic to sewer.

So we have actually probably 20 to 30,000 water customers that are on septic, they're not even on the sewer system.

And there were a lot of subdivisions that were built, even in the early 90s that for some reason were not tied into the sewer system, they're all septic.

Now, over the years, as these septic fields fail, there's not a lot of alternatives to just build a new septic field because you you need a septic tank and a leach field.

And if you have a moderately sized or small backyard, there's no more room once that leech field is exhausted, you can't build a new leach field.

So there's going to be opportunities where area by area we can convert over to sewer, and then that creates the wastewater that then becomes reclaimed water and it gets added to the exchange.

And through our master plan, we did a deep dive on that, and we felt that there's around three million gallons per day that goes into septic fields and not the sewer system, and that's about 3,500 acre foot a year.

So that's more than we could get out of the Bartlett project.

So very significant.

And that's something that could be done in small pieces.

You could have a 20-year plan and then just target areas one area after another.

And then we continue to find and fix leaks.

We have a lot of advanced technology to where we do keep our system leakage down and we keep that water in the system.

And then smart metering has been a tremendous saver of water.

Because how that works is it goes through the, it's not a leak from our system.

It goes through the customer's meter.

And then before we had a centralized smart meter system, um, a small leak of a half a gallon a minute is 20,000 gallons a month.

And someone would not notice that if it was just at a toilet or if it was just a small leak in the backyard at half a gallon a minute.

Sometimes it would take two billing cycles for someone to realize, hey, my bill went up $500.

What happened?

And we would investigate it, they find out from their landscaper, yeah, there's a leak.

And then meanwhile, they're out a thousand dollars, and um all that water was lost.

So with the smart metering, we have a continuous leakage monitor.

So the software senses that as soon as if 24 hours goes by and the meter has never stopped turning, then there's a leak.

If it's never stopped, there's a leak.

And now we have a program where that generates a work order to where we call reach out to the customer and say, listen, the system has detected that um, well, first of all, we'll ask some questions are you filling you refilling your pool or you're doing something because our system is showing that you have probably have a leak.

And then in every case, almost every case, where they've called a landscaper or a plumber, sure enough, they found a leak.

And so that leak is is found and stopped within a day or two days rather than two months.

And some calcs that we've done show that when we get the system built out, that could save um over a million gallons a day in the system.

So tremendous amount of water can be saved just by having real-time um documentation or um accuracy of finding leaks.

So and there's other things on here.

There's some partnerships with other communities, but you know, those are early on.

I don't want to talk too much about those because we have a lot of discussions to do, but there's there's various partnerships that would add some water uh to the future.

But that's one list.

Um before we wrap it up, I'll pause and see if you have any questions.

Mr.

Summers, Mr.

Adams, any questions so far.

No, Mayor, I'm I'm good.

Thank you.

Want to go to the last slide then?

So just wrapping this all up then.

So the current 20-year plan is coming to an end at the end of this year.

So we're gonna need a new set of guidelines to start in 2027, and that'll be dictated by the final environmental impact statement that'll be done this summer.

So one thing I did not mention is there is talk of possibly because these cuts could be a shock to Arizona, there could be a phased in approach where the first five years is not so onerous.

Maybe it's on the order of the 20% cut we showed you, but maybe not too much more.

That remains to be seen.

There's a lot that needs to be worked out, but there could be an initial phase in.

That's that's one idea that's floating out there.

Um, and just going back to the graphs that we showed you, Mesa going back half a century, has built a very resilient portfolio.

We continue to build it, and we will all the way till build out to stay ahead of cuts and shortages.

Uh future supplies, there's no doubt, they're gonna be expensive.

They're gonna be very expensive.

That advanced treatment, the water purification at 91st Avenue, very expensive.

Bartlett is very expensive.

So as we create this long list of options to build on our portfolio, the different options keep jocking around on the list because one that seemed like it was a pretty good value now, it's become real expensive, and then one that seems expensive, maybe is better.

So we keep shifting that list because it's not just about the water we can get, but how affordable is it too, because eventually that's gonna be passed on to our ratepayers.

And then water conservation is something it's it's worth noting as our last bullet because we didn't talk about it, but there's a curve that if you want to go back one more time to that graph that shows our projected usage, that curve could change shape.

Um and that could be in your hands, uh depending on where things go in the future with the water shortage management plan.

So um in 2022, um, city manager Chris Brady declared that we're in stage one, which is really just a water watch.

It doesn't have a direct impact on the customers, it's more just informative to the customers.

It's more of a the city doing things to conserve water and demonstrate that through our own operations we can conserve.

But as you get into stages two through four, uh that's gonna be that's not the city manager's call.

That's gonna be more on the shoulders of of mayor and council.

So we're gonna give you those tools that that give options for you to select and work with customers, it's gonna really involve a lot of outreach with the community, which we continue to do through social media, but continue that dialogue with the customers and letting them know that well, first of all, staying ahead of here's where we are, here's what's coming, here's conservation measures that you can think about implementing.

And um with that, I'll see if there's any final questions.

Other than that, that's the end of our presentation.

I had one question, just going back to the rates, the cap rates being cut or the cap amounts being cut, and us using the Hila River Indian community as part of our supplementation for that.

Did I understand correctly when Council Member Goforth asked if the Gila River Indian communities cap would be cut because I thought that they had sovereign rights to a certain amount of water that the federal government can't cut, and that we subsequently, because of this exchange, get to receive essentially their sovereign rights and water amounts.

Mayor, Councilmember Taylor.

So you're sort of right.

So here's here's how that all plays out.

So the water rights that they the allocation they have could be subject to cuts, but there's contracts with the between the federal government and the Indian communities that state that the federal government's required to firm them.

And what firm means is for instance, I'll give you an example.

I don't know if takeovers the right term, but we want to have um half of the the new pool being created at Bartlett.

They would pay for it.

But the reason that they would own half of that pool is that they would use that then to, to your point, firm those Indian tribes.

So they might get cut initially, but through contracts that go back many years, the federal government is expected to step in, bring supplies, and firm them, which is a benefit to us because if we have that agreement that relies so heavily on ever increasing amount of water through that exchange, we want them to be firmed.

They're firming us in a way, because they're doing it for the Indian community.

Right.

So they're our partner, and we want them to be, we want them to come out uh in the end to be made whole and to be firmed, and it would be to our our benefit.

But there could be initial cuts that I I expect to that supply.

Okay.

But we can say in confidence that those initial cuts will be re um supplied at some point.

If you look at the contracts and uh the requirements um on the federal government with the Indian communities, then one would say, yeah, you would expect it.

We have to see how it plays out.

Okay.

Yeah.

So even even mayor council, so even though they're not immune from cuts, um, just with the seniority that their water rights bring, it greatly minimizes what those percentages may be.

So even if these other classes of water take a 20, 25 percent, you know, cut, but you won't see that necessarily on tribal water because of the seniority associated with their with their rights.

And so that that certainly doesn't, again, make us immune from any um cuts because that would trickle down to our agreement uh proportionally, but it makes that the safest water we could possibly have.

And it builds a great deal of value in that contract that we built out in the pipeline that we built out, and it also bolsters Mesa as being incredibly responsible and mature and how we forecasted our water usage because there is an expectation that each city is in charge of how it's projecting its 100 year assured water plan and its growth and its development, and they are accountable for their choices and how they manage their water, their infrastructure for their people, and so I think it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we let our residents know that we've done an exceedingly good job to provide for them now and into the future, and we have every right to protect our water as our own.

And the the Heather River Indian community has agreed to a minimum amount of exchange per year, right?

Whether they need it or not, so that we have that we we um accept or get those rights, regardless of they whether they accept the exchanged water.

Right, Mayor Councilmember Goforth.

In many conversations we've had with them, the more water we can produce and deliver to them, the better.

So the the need is there for them anyway.

But but you're right, it's a contract.

So we're we're going we can count on that.

And that was all factored into the ROI.

On I mean, uh, as you know, as we've talked about, it's a very expensive project, but the ROI pays pays itself back very quickly, and and they're contractually obligated, and and we've always had a great relationship with the community, and and this is just further evidence of that partnership.

So thank you to the two of you for this.

It's great, and I think I hope our residents watch this and they understand what we're doing at the city of Mesa and the expense and the foresight and the forward thinking that it takes, but that when rate adjustment time comes, these are the important aspects of what we're trying how we're trying to secure our future, and it's reflected in those adjustments.

You know, we're trying to be very sensitive to what people can afford, but we'll we're also um securing our water future, and and and it's expensive, it's expensive.

So I I hope this is informative to people and to why the the adjustments happen.

So thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate that comment.

Um I think we have like 250 million or so around near that figure for the central reuse pipeline and the assault um the signal abuse water treatment um plant expansion, and then the SMRs, the smart meters, some like that.

So these add up, and then you know, we still have work to do, and water is getting more expensive, but it is very important that we continue to invest in in these tools.

Um, and it is probably the biggest pressure or a significant pressure on our water rates is being able to take these funds, you know.

We have we bond for these and being we have we have to make these investments.

Um we're using savings accounts our our um, you know, what do we call our um overage, you know, our and our net re revenue to bridge the rates right now, but that's going to come to an end, and we have to continue to make investments.

The reality is we live in the desert and we're dealing with water challenges, and Mesa is doing excellent job in managing that, but water will not uh will continually to have have a lot of pressure on the investments we need to make, uh, the things that we need to do in order to ensure that we have water and um and are well managed.

Um stage two of our water um shortage plan.

Is our indicators or is there factors that happen that where we do that consideration at what point do we have the discussion about the stage two?

Okay, Mayor Councilmember Duff.

So there's triggers with each stage.

So the amount of cuts that we're anticipating on the Colorado River would trigger definitely trigger a stage two.

Um, but that would be for your consideration to just evaluate that, evaluate what measures you you have that could be put into place.

Then in the subsequent stages three and four, same thing that each have triggers there's some suggested ideas of what we could do if we get into stage two for consideration.

One might be the overseeding in the winter, being, you know, the residents can't do, you know, shouldn't do that in order to conserve water.

That's just an example.

These are met measures that I think we can all fit into the way we live without compromising it, but collectively when we all work together and and be more conservative with our water use, we we can meet the demands and keep water affordable as possible and not strain our portfolio.

There's a there's flexibility built into the drought management plan.

So it doesn't have a list of 12 things and say these must be done.

It has a list of um 12 or so things that like not overseeding or um uh not turning uh not watering your lawn after 7 a.m.

that kind of thing.

So there's a list of things, and then the the nice thing about that is it's for you to just sit down and discuss and say I like these six, but these six maybe aren't right for our community, so it gives you the flexibility to talk through that.

Chris and Jesse, uh what I haven't heard is are we still waiting for the sign-off for our assured water supply from ADWR?

I see heads nodding back there.

We are, yes.

Uh and that's been ongoing for how many, like two years here now?

That's probably about about right.

So the last one is yeah, Kathy, you wanna uh I I find this frustrating uh from a city perspective because as we've always had an assured water supply, and I I'm not comfortable waiting for the sign-off, you know, for all these times.

Kathy, how long has it been?

Um, Mayor and Council, it's been since October of 2023 that we submitted our application, and we submitted it early ahead of time, hoping that it would be processed quickly, but for a number of reasons, it has not been.

However, the Department of Water Resources did extend our current designation, so we technically are still designated.

Well, and keep in mind as we go along, our legislature feels like how many water bills are there out there, like over 100, maybe we have 118 bills right now at the end of the year.

Affecting water in the state of Arizona and municipalities.

That's why I want to stress again, it's very important we have local control of what we're supposed to be doing and not outsource it to the legislature.

Now there might be some good in there, but I'm I still think that the way we have done business since 1878 in the city of Mesa that our grandfathering and all our water supplies have are impeccable, and uh I don't want them, I'll say it messed with.

Okay.

I mean, I buy several hundred acre feet for my farming operation.

I know how precious water is.

And and I'll give you a scenario.

You know, three years ago we had a lot of extra water for the rains, all the reservoirs filled up on the Verde and Salt watersheds, and 400,000 acre feet of water was released during that time.

Now, had the skiff been in place, had you know the NCS, uh Roosevelt had filled up to almost maximum capacity.

We could have diverted that water through the SCIF into the CAP, kept all the water back that would be delivered through CAP and utilize that and you know, lengthen out the time we needed cap water.

So these are things, you know, with Barlett Dam uh being raised and capturing that acre foot is is really important.

Uh the other thing is what I didn't hear is uh projected well sites for eastern and southern zones.

Uh what's our you know, I've always said, hey, are we in queue for you know, purchasing of parcels, you know, even if we drill a well, cap it, have it for future, you know, the cost of well drilling a well and outfitting the day is what's the dollar amount?

Well, the whole thing to design drill it and to equip it.

We just well, we just did a bid for Desert Well 7 to equip it was four and a half, and the drilling was a couple million, so you're at between six and seven to fully drill, build out a well, but we see the prices leveling off.

Um we've talked, we're talking with other entities, other cities, and they're seeing prices come down even more.

So we're not trying to do all our wells at once, we're trying to bid them out in stages, and if the market is going down favorable direction, we don't want to put them all out at once.

So we're we're metering them out.

And Jesse, you want to talk about kind of where we're at with our well sites?

Sure.

Um so we have uh quite a number of wells in Southeast Mesa that have been drilled.

I think there's about five or six that that have been drilled recently.

And as Chris said, they're in various stages of the equipping.

Um we have two wells that are gonna come out to bid in a couple months here down in Southeast Mesa, and then we have a number more that are in various stages.

So when you drill a the it when you do a well, it's a two-stage process.

First, you drill it, you test the water quality, and you you figure out the capacity, and then you design the equipping of it.

So we have two that are gonna go out to bid this spring.

Uh Desert Wells 25 and 26, those are down by the signal butte plant.

So that'll build up that well field.

And then there's still half a dozen or so more wells.

Um have already been drilled, uh, as Jesse mentioned, and then a few more have yet to be drilled.

And then if you go further south, uh there's another well field that's in the future.

That's like 10 years out.

So we have plans to do something with wells for the next 20 years and at some degree.

And you have the budget for all that.

Well, that's why it's over 20 years.

Because well, as I was able to meet with one of our federal legislators and asked him for some funding sources, so we'll see if he can come through.

I know that uh Miranda and Kathy are on that.

With that, counsel any other questions?

I I just want to say thank you to Chris for his leadership in serving as a director.

You will be missed.

I don't know if you'll miss coming to council meet and presenting.

Maybe not, but come by and see us when you can.

Thank you for your service and expertise and leadership that we're in a what a great place considering our challenges in our water pro portfolio.

I know that's due to you and your entire team.

Thank you for working together and all that you do to bring us to this point of pride for our water system.

Thank you very much.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you.

I echo that thank you so much.

You'll make it.

Mayor, uh I appreciate Councilmember Duff.

She she beat me to the punch because certainly we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chris and the tremendous work that he's done.

And he's he's actually stayed longer than he had to uh to get here.

That's why I think his wife said no more.

But uh, and you know, maybe in the private sector, you get a gold watch as a parting gift.

Here we let him come and present to council for two hours.

So uh so that's what we we do in the public.

But no, Chris and his his team have positioned the city well, and I I think that is so important as we discuss this today.

It is that resiliency that Chris has talked about that allows us to be certain when we're talking to businesses about locating to Mesa.

We've talked to our residents about the assurity that they will have water and they'll be able to um live their lives as you know as they've been used to because of that diverse portfolio that that we have.

It doesn't come without challenges and its cost, as been alluded to, but Mesa is well positioned, and as they discussed today, we want to cast a wide net for future sources too.

Some of these may not pencil out, some of them may not be practical, but it's because we did that historically that's allowed us to um then lean in on those items that that have worked and that do make sense financially.

So uh appreciate that the department continues to do that and kind of keep all sources um future sources on the table as as technology evolves and as cost and other things get get hammered out.

So, Chris, thank you for your leadership.

And you will definitely be missed.

You've got a strong team and and great great folks coming in uh that'll that'll keep us moving in the right direction.

But your your leadership is definitely appreciated.

Well, thank you.

And team is the operative word, we got a great one here, and uh things are gonna continue seamlessly, and you'll see.

Uh, this is a static snapshot of where we are today.

Team's gonna keep coming back and just updating you as we learn more and we develop our plans.

But uh the solid team we have in place right now is is gonna make that all possible.

So I want to thank them.

Great, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your service.

I think we're gonna have a retirement party sometime soon for you.

Next week, Tuesday.

It's not my last day, but it's Tuesday.

Mr.

Butler, remind us who's gonna is we have an interim water person.

Well, he's uh he's sitting right back there.

You all know you all know Joe from his great great leadership.

Um right now in Solid Waste, but uh Joe has a lot of water experience from his time at the city of Phoenix prior uh into this, and so um he'll be able to step in and and as Chris said, just help lead this great team uh moving forward.

So it's uh that next person up mentality here.

We we lose a great director, but we'll we've got the bench and we've got the people in the city who can step up and and um keep this moving forward.

Great, great.

All right, thank you.

Thank you, Chris and Jesse.

Mayor move over to item two, acknowledge the council member.

Um there's the voice.

Okay.

Hello, Mr.

Absolutely.

Voice from the sky.

I just, if I may, just a moment.

I won't uh I won't belabor, but I will uh reinforce everything that's been said about Chris.

Um thank you.

And uh, I've been very impressed with you and your knowledge from the first time we met in uh about a year ago.

Um I would just add to what we've heard this morning that Chris, the only the only uh the criticism I've had is the timing of this.

Had this presentation been made perhaps a month or so before we had to wrestle with utility rates, it would have been a very strong reinforcement and educational process to to those folks who simply can't understand that there need to be from time to time reasonable increases to keep up with the expenses that continue to mount.

So I'm going to hold on to this presentation as a resort as a resource when we have to face rate issues down the road.

So uh thanks for a very comprehensive presentation.

And um, I think I think we just owe uh a great debt of gratitude to the people who came before us all the way back to a hundred years or so for laying the groundwork for a solid reliable supply of of clean water, drinkable water, um, here in the desert.

So thanks for all this information.

I think it really reinforces why we occasionally have to take a look at adjusting our rates.

So thank you.

Okay, Mr.

Adams, you shouldn't have said that because now it I remember some.

So there's a bill in the legislature right now that the committee's hearing that would place a moratorium on any fee utility or rate increase in a municipality for four years, a moratorium.

And to me, that's troubling.

It's it's constrains our ability to meet the demands.

And uh like our CFO said, you know, if we have some type of utility mishap and we have to fund something, and we can't do a fee increase.

Not you know, we look at increases incrementally, and this would constrain us from doing this.

So uh I find that's problematic for municipality, and I think we all know that.

So thank you, Mr.

Adams, for bringing that to the forefront.

Okay.

Hearing nothing else from above me.

Um item two is acknowledge the receipt of board minutes.

Is there a motion to that effect?

Thank you, Miss Stuff.

Miss Taylor, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Motion passes.

Next is current events and conferences attended.

Council members, do you have anything you wish to share?

I'll mention that uh oh, I think I beat you to the punch.

But um yesterday I met with the mayor's youth committee just shortly to um greet them as they were doing a tour of City Hall and Downtown Mesa.

And that tour is led by Jeff McVay and Jimmy at um downtown Mesa Association.

I love the group at the NYC, the mayor's youth committee, and um how they're learning more about how government works and how our city functions.

They're uh bright group of kids have great ideas for us, and I I look forward to see them as our future leaders.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

I just wanted to mention the ribbon cutting that you and I went to yesterday for a hotel, my place hotel out in um the southeast part of my district at Signal View and the 60.

This area continues to grow.

Uh people are are moving there to live.

There's a lot of housing going in, to work, um, honor health recently acquired the hospital there, and are doing some uh major investments and and then to visit.

So this was well need much needed, and uh it was a nice ceremony.

Thank you.

Anything from Mr.

Adams, Vice Mayor.

Nothing from above, sir.

Nothing here.

All right.

Well, uh I know Mr.

McVay had a family emergency, wish him well that with that.

Um I did a fill your plate podcast for Arizona Farm Bureau yesterday talking about uh just agriculture municipalities and how everything is uh transitioned from ag into technology, uh advanced manufacturing, and uh all these different components, so it's really nice.

Um I did go to the mayor's youth committee and on the top of the roof with Mr.

McVay, and that was a cool thing to see the whole city.

Uh Saturday is the state of Arizona's birthday, uh February 14th, and so everybody wear your bolo tie that day.

And apparently today there's somebody has a birthday.

He's in this room.

Yes.

Uh, Mr.

Butler.

You know, you thought you'd get away with it, huh?

No, I know.

I'm just another year old mayor.

All right.

I know.

He looks so young.

And you're so and you're celebrating with the mayor today.

Sure.

No stress.

Happy birthday.

All right, happy birthday to Mr.

Butler.

Um, with that, can you share future meetings?

Well, you know, I certainly got my birthday wish today, which is to be here with all of you in study session, right?

So uh yeah.

But uh mayor and council, uh we will um maybe unfortunately we we uh would have loved to have done both items this morning, but considering this was almost a two hour discussion on water, it's maybe uh great that uh we only had one item today, but we will find a time soon to reschedule um the ASU discussion.

We we've got some pretty weighty topics coming up before council in the next um several weeks with budget kickoff, um, some Falcon Field discussions, um uh other other items that are going to be coming forward.

So uh we will get this scheduled and we'll work with your staff.

We may need to do the ASU uh discussion before uh the next council meeting before the stuff during the study session on the 23rd.

So, but we'll we need to verify that with Mr.

McVay and with ASU and everyone to make sure that they can make that work.

So just be on notice that we may need to start earlier that day so we don't get too far behind with our pack schedule that we have um leading into the budget season.

So, with that though, we'll also spend some great quality time together next Thursday for our strategic planning session.

Uh very excited about this because this is the strategic planning session planned by the city council.

So uh we're uh we're we're gonna have some fun next Thursday, so be prepared to spend all day with us practically.

Uh so be prepared for that.

And then we will be back on uh Monday, February the 23rd, start time to be determined for study session and uh the council meeting.

But important note so today you will receive the first draft of the agenda for February 23rd.

Since we're not having study session next week because of the strategic planning session, the first time we'll be able to talk as a group about the items on the agenda will be um on the 23rd at the study session before the formal meeting.

So I encourage you, staff is at your disposal.

Please look over the agenda if you have any questions, concerns, um talk to staff uh during that time, and we'd love to answer any questions that you may have since we won't be able to discuss that next Thursday morning.

So remind us where the sessions are or study session.

Uh that's going to be at the post, Mayor.

So yeah, at the post next Thursday uh at 7 30 um a.m.

So that's the strategic planning session next.

And it's not videoed, but it is a public.

It is a public meeting.

It's over here.

Anybody likes to geek out about city stuff?

You're welcome to sit in and listen.

Yeah, absolutely.

And uh and mayor, just to just a final reminder on a couple of items.

Again, uh the Mesa Merit, besides it being statehood day on the 14th, it's also the Mason Marathon.

So uh just be prepared for that and the tens of thousands of runners that will be on our streets that morning.

And then uh Monday the 16th is President's Day.

City offices are closed, but just a reminder of the fallen firefighter memorial ceremony, our annual event um at 8 30 a.m.

that morning um here at um in downtown Mesa by Fire Station 201.

So thank you.

Yeah.

Is the next meeting the 23rd, you said?

Is that the one where we're gonna go over the building codes that we've been delaying for such a long time?

The international building.

Yes, that is on Amanda's giving me the hit.

Yes, that will be on on the agenda.

So um the the ratification of the text amendment.

Um am I saying this correctly, Mark?

As okay, but I'm looking at everyone.

Make sure I don't miss misspeak on this um based on the council direction that uh from the last study.

Got it.

Okay, thanks.

Great.

Oh, with that, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

Thank you, Miss Gilford.

Thank you, Mr.

Redia.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

All right.

Get well and have a great weekend.