Commissioner Robert Brant and consultant Jason Davenport (GHD) presented an update on the Skinnateles Lake chlorine conversion project and discussed the city's lead service line replacement program. The meeting focused on the transition from gaseous chlorine to liquid chlorine at the Skinnateles plant, the status of lead service line replacement phases, funding challenges, and community impacts.
Good morning. Uh to start our meeting. I'm joined by my colleague. Myself, and of course, we are joined by our water commissioner. You gotta say your last name for me. Robert Brant. So okay Brandt. Commissioner Brandt. And Jason Davenport. Okay. Welcome. We are here to talk about if you were following the previous voting session. We are here to talk about item 11, 10 and 11. And it is going to highlight uh water chlorine conversion project at the Skinnato Lake. Uh Commissioner, you want to take it away for us? Yeah, I just want to start out by saying this is Jason Davenport from GHD. He's uh been part of the talks of this project since I believe 2003. Um this is a major infrastructure project for the village of Skinny Atlas to remove the chlorine gas out of the center of the village. Um we've used to have chlorine gas out at Westcott and Woodland reservoirs. We've removed them, and you know, because of the hazard of chlorine gas, and we're looking to just remove that from the village of Skinny Atlas as well and go to hypo. Um this Jason has worked on this and have discussed this project for many years, so I brought him to do a little presentation on it so that you guys know what's going on. Right, thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Great to meet everybody. Welcome to the Commissioner said, I'm Jason. I work with GHD. GHD's been working with the city for for decades. I've been fortunate to have spent the past couple of decades, you know, working with the water department, working with the airport when it was a city entity, right? You know, some some different entities here, so it's nice to continue being a part of this stuff. So today, you know, it's my understanding that we're interested in learning a bit more about the Skinny Atlas chlorine facility. And so I was gonna spend you know, 10, 15 minutes, something like that, just giving a little bit of background on, you know, initially just a background on water treatment, disinfection in particular, because that's what we're talking about here is disinfection, and then we'll narrow in a little bit on chlorine disinfection, which is what the city does. We'll talk about, like the commissioner said, that the city's been through a couple of different iterations of what they do with disinfection, and then we'll talk about the skinny atlas site and next steps and considerations with that. So I was just gonna give just a broader background, you know, just to kind of bring everyone to the same place. Some of you have been here a long time or and are maybe familiar with all of this. Um, but we're we're gonna talk about disinfection overall. So right now that the slides aren't advancing. If anyone has a paper copy, I'm on the third slide that says water treatment overview. Okay, so most you uh water utilities of this size, typically, if you're pulling from a surface water, there's a lot of things that you do, right? So water usually flows downhill, right? So it's usually at a lower point than where the city is. So first step, usually you have to pump it uphill. Okay, pumping's expensive, you know, it's very energy intensive, costs a lot of money. Usually you have to settle it. You have to get all the solids out of the water, you filter it, which is kind of polishing it. You know, it's taking whatever remaining solids and particulate out of the water, and then those processes are going to create a sludge only in water. We don't call it sludge because sludge is not a nice word in water. We call it residuals, so you have to manage those residuals, and then you're left with a water that has no particulate in it, and then you're going to disinfect that. You're gonna remove any of the microorganisms so that people don't get sick, and then you're gonna add things like fluoride or tooth health. You're gonna uh work on taste and odor if you need to, and then you'll add in older systems such as the city.