Anchorage Assembly: Infrastructure, Enterprise and Utility Oversight Committee-of-the-Whole Meeting

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Infrastructure Enterprise and Utility Oversight Committee of the Anchorage Assembly. It is 11:16. We are noticed from 11:15 to 12:15 today.

Let's start with member introductions, please. Donald Handlin. Jared Gerker. Sydney Scow. Anna Brawley.

Erin Baldwin Day. And on the phone, we have Member Martinez, I believe.

Yes, thank you. All right, we are going to dive right into some— what I think is going to be a really interesting presentation on some winter system emergencies in our water and wastewater system. So would you all please introduce yourselves for the record and then feel free to dive right in.

Mark Stafford, Deputy Municipal Manager. David Persinger, Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility General Manager. Brian Boss, Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility Operations and Maintenance Director. Great. And just one note, I was— for our member on the phone, if you would make sure to have the microphone a little bit close to your face while you're talking.

I was on the phone yesterday for a committee meeting, and it was really hard to hear unless people were like right into the mic. So thank you. Go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. I'm here to give you a presentation on last winter's impacts on water and wastewater service in this community. Just a little bit about myself. I was raised in Anchorage and I've worked with the utility for about over 20 years now. Living in Alaska as long as I have, I know that Winters affect people differently for different reasons.

You know, sometimes that's the darkness, sometimes it's the weather. Seemed like last winter was a little bit more difficult than other winters, but if you look at the records, we really didn't exceed— we didn't break any records last winter, at least not many. So is that perception real? For me, if I don't get out regularly, I seem to have a bad winter. And so when I was preparing through these— this presentation, I was flipping through my phone and just kind of seeing— normally I'd have pictures on my phone of powder skiing and getting out a lot.

I really didn't have as many pictures last winter, and the ones that I did were kind of consistent with this cold and icy. So photo on the right was me ice skating Jim Creek in January. I mean, we're already well into the winter in January. You can see there's not a lot of snow on the banks, not a lot of snow on the mountains. And then the bottom photo is me fat tire biking to Knik Glacier.

It was pretty easy to get to the glacier at that time. There wasn't a lot of snow on the ground. I was able to bike on the lake. This is me sliding through an ice hole that we found.

My working life was pretty similar. It kind of paralleled the experience I had in my personal life. I seemed to work a lot last winter. There was a lot going on as far as breaks and emergencies. It seems like everybody was going through low morale and just issues associated with a hard winter.

How do we know whether or not this was just a perception or something real? I mean, Anchorage is a winter city. Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility is structured to deal with the winter, both in the way we operate our design requirements and our regulatory requirements. For this reason, we bury pipes deep in the ground below frost level. We have aspects of our piping that it can be thawed.

We operate with a heat exchanger to where we can put heated water into the system to kind of mitigate freezing issues. So, how we know if it's different than any other winter is we got data to do data comparisons, weather data from NOAA, data with Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility. We're not really doing our job unless we analyze that data and see how it impacted the community and impacted the utility, because if it was different than any other winter, we got to try to make continuous improvement. We try to— got to try to get better. So that's really what we're doing right now this summer, and that's why we wanted to talk and present to you, is just to kind of tell you what we're finding and tell you how it impacted the community.

I'm going to pause you just for a moment and note for the record that Member Park joined us at 11:18 and Member Silver on the phone at 11:20. Go ahead.

Oh, and apparently Member McCormick is also here.

So to go over the weather data, what we've done in this presentation is we've compared last winter all the way back to the winter of 2020 and 2021, and mostly what we were looking at was air temperature data and snowfall data. As I said, that a lot of our infrastructure is buried below frost depth, Snowfall impacts us greatly. If we have low snow years, frost depth drives deeper and it can creep into our pipe depth window and, and cause us all sorts of problems with freezing and other things. So the image on the left is the NOAA air temperature data. NOAA tracks data all the way back to the 1950s.

This tan band you see in the middle of the chart is the average air temperature data compiled from the '50s to present. Uh, anything above it in red are higher temperatures than normal, with the dark red line being like the record high, high air temperatures. Anything below it in the light blue is low temperatures, lower than normal, and the light blue line is the record low temperatures. What we experienced last year is in dark blue, and so what you will see is when we hit the fall time frame, we have a lot of persistent long durations where we were below the normal temperature. A lot of those exceed below zero, which is colder than normal.

We did have a heat up kind of right after January, but then In the, in the springtime, it was also persistent cold, long durations, and below zero for longer. When you match that up with the snowfall data, the tan line here is your average snowfall, accumulated snowfall. The dark blue line would be your record high snowfall. The red line would be your record low snowfall. What we experienced last year We basically didn't have any snow in the springtime.

So when you match that up with our colder temperatures, it drove frost deeper. We got snow in January with that heat up, but then it was persistent cold after that. So it somewhat matches with my experience where I showed you the picture in January where there wasn't a lot of snow in the beginning of the year and it was just persistent cold.

But what does that really mean? I mean, it didn't set any records. We don't know unless we compare it to other years. So when you take a look back in like 2024 and 2025, the winter before, you can see we had some persistent cold, but it didn't dip below the zero line. We got a little bit more snowfall than we did in last winter in the beginning of the year, but less in the, uh, springtime frame.

In 2023 and 2024, we did have persistent cold and it did drop below zero, but we had record snowfall insulating the ground from the start of the year. That was a really big snow year. So 2023, 2022 and 2023, not as persistent cold. It didn't dip below zero as long, and we had more snow than we did in the winter of 2025. 2021 And 2022, more average snowfall, less persistent cold.

And then finally, winter of 2020 and 2021, again, average snowfall year, more average snowfall year, and you just didn't have those persistent dips below the zero mark. So that's really the moral of the story. It was a little bit different than other years. And that difference was less snow in the fall time and persistent cold dipping below zero. Now, again, that's all well and good.

It was a little bit different of a winter, but how did it impact the utility and how did it impact the community? The biggest thing we saw was frozen services reporting— reported by our customers. So, Last winter, we received calls and reports from our customers of about 250, 240 frozen services. That dwarfs the number of calls we got in the previous years of the data I just showed you in the winter. I mean, if you go back to 2019, 2020, which is one of the bigger records I found, they were a little less than 100.

So, I mean, it's well over 3 times what we normally get. As far as frozen services.

Where they were across the municipality of Anchorage, if you just looked at one year, it would be a scatter plot. You really couldn't tell a rhyme or a reason to it. When you start to stack the data on top of each other and look at it all the way back in history, you can see hotter nodes where we have more frozen services in like the Nenaka Valley area and then in the downtown area. And a lot of that is probably attributed to shallow berry.

Shallowberry water infrastructure.

We need to look at that and see how it really impacted the community. So we had more freezing services than normal, but how did everybody handle that? Per our regulation, thawing is the responsibility of the customer. So the utility has to do work when we get a report of frozen services, but it's up to the company— the customer to hiring a thawing company to go out and thaw the service.

So on the right side of the screen, you'll see a water, a water service image. This would be the water main in the street that serves many customers. This pipe is the water service that goes directly to the home. It's buried about 10 feet deep on average.

There is a valve to control water to the property. The valve itself is 10 feet 10 feet below the ground too. There's a key box on top, which is— everybody sees it looks like a metal mushroom in your yard, but that's how we actually turn on and turn off the water using this rod that turns the valve at the 10 feet deep in the ground. What's important when you're looking at thawing is there's a thaw wire that comes out by the key box, and it goes down to where the service connection connects to the main. When thawing companies thaw out water services, they hook a thawing machine onto this wire in the house and they push a current through the pipe.

The current itself is actually what thaws the water main.

This depiction on the left side of the screen is the sewer service. Uh, you can see the sewer main here that serves many customers. What you have is a 4-inch pipe that goes to the house that's buried about 8 feet deep with a slope to it. When sewer services freeze, a thawing company will come out and they will run a jet of water to try to clean the ice out of the service to get it flowing again. As I said, thawing is the responsibility of the customer.

So when, when a service freezes, what a customer typically does is they're going to call AWWU because that's just the natural the natural thing. I don't know what's going on, they call the utility. We tell them to call a thawing company. We coordinate with the customer and the thawing company. They usually have us locate the service, the key box, so they can complete the thawing or the cleanout, so they can do the thawing on property.

Normal winters, that process of thawing takes private industry hours to a day to to do. Last winter, because of the volume of freezing services we had, it was more like days to weeks, and we had people reporting with a month out of water. So what did that do? It was incredibly frustrating to our customers. We would give them a charge of roughly $250 to do the locate, do a continuity test on the thaw wire to make sure it was operating correctly.

They would have to pay for that. That would happen right away when something froze up. Then they'd get the answer from the thawing company that I'm a month out or weeks out. And so obviously it just created a lot of friction with the customer. They at times took it out on our staff, which created low morale and just a lot of frustration for everybody.

Frozen services was a big deal. Probably the next biggest thing was the complexity of our excavation activity. Uh, AWW always has to respond to emergency excavations. A lot of that is associated with water infrastructure. What we found last winter was we did less digs, but they were more effort to conduct.

Uh, so what you can see in the data table on the right is a Comparison of the amount of digs we have over the winters we've been looking at. We had 83 digs last winter compared to the winter of 2021-2022, which we had 220 digs. But the people that excavate those digs, dig the holes in the ground, they spent much more overtime hours on those 83 digs than they did on the 220 digs. So they were spending more of an effort doing those 83 digs. And that was really related to the complexity of that type of excavation.

What we did is we delayed a lot of work for the summer. So, when we normally would have an emergency in the winter, like a frozen hydrant where the hydrant leg would need to be excavated to thaw it, or a broken hydrant, we would just valve it out of service and get to it in the summer. We also had frozen water main last year. We haven't experienced frozen water main in my time at the utility, so that was very unique. So it changed the complexity of the dig and we pushed off a lot of work to the summer.

That's really the message. Just to give you an idea—. May I ask a question on that previous slide? Sure.

How many hydrants ended up being delayed for summer maintenance? As far as the actual numbers, I'm not certain, but it was quite a few of them. I'd say over half of what we'd normally get to. Is there a threshold at which the fire department starts to get nervous about that? We have a threshold of hydrants we need to keep in service.

So we need to keep like 99% of the hydrants in service, and we do maintain that goal.

So that factors into what we respond to is basically the separation distance of the hydrants. We want them closer together. I think the number is like 300 feet apart. And so if there's one greater, basically we have a priority of where we would leave them to the summer is the moral there. Got it.

So there's a strategy for that. Correct. Thank you very much. So, an example of the complexity of the excavations, the majority of the excavations we do are associated with the on-property valve. Most of the issues with the on-property valve we can fix at the surface, digging a very small hole.

We have tools where a limited amount of staff can fix those problems at the surface. That's why we had more emergency digs in prior years, is because we were doing more of these, and we can do 2 or 3 of those a day.

To reestablish continuity wires or respond to a break, we have to send someone down the hole, which means we have to have a more complex dig. It's got to be bigger because we have to put trench shoring equipment to get down 10 feet deep. We have to pump clean air into the excavation so people can breathe down there. We have to— it's basically, it takes a lot longer time. It's a lot more complex.

So we can do a lot less of them a day. 1 To 2 a day, basically. As far as an example of something we delayed and left till summer, this is Kendall Ford. Kendall Ford is served by this dark blue water main. Their water main actually loops around their building, so they have a redundancy in their water service.

It's fed in 2 spots. They— we had a break on the main that went onto property. That affected this fire hydrant and their service. We just valved it out of service until the summer because we had that redundant connection. So we had the option to leave that break till a later date to when we could get to it.

We are so backlogged right now, we actually still have not fixed that break.

I mentioned frozen water mains. In my 20 years here at the utility, we've experienced frozen hydrant legs, but as far as frozen water main that serves multiple customers, I've heard of it, but I've never seen it myself. We had 3 last winter. What was odd is they all occurred within a couple of days of each other, right around the end of March. As far as where they were located, there's really no rhyme or reason to it.

It's more based on the depth of the main. We had 2 kind of in the downtown area and 1 in South Anchorage. The most complicated one was the one in South Anchorage, and that was also the first one we dealt with. It took us over a week to resolve, from March 31st to April 9th.

A lot of the reason it took us a week to resolve is we had to kind of learn how to figure out where the main was frozen. So, there was a little bit of an analysis at the surface where we operated valves. When we couldn't turn a valve, we knew it was frozen. So that's where we dug to try to thaw it. We had to come up with a method of how to thaw a water main.

What we ended up doing is cutting the pipe, and then we would send a burst of steam down it through a steam hose supplied by this type of truck, a boiler truck. And then we would send a jet of hot water through it. With this type of truck, which is a hydro-excavator that has a jet head on it. And so this particular main was 11 feet deep, so it was very deep. The ground froze very deep in that area.

And we thawed about 1,000 feet of main there. The next two excavations were less complicated, and we kind of knew the method to the madness on how to de-thaw them. One was at the Curling Club. It took us from March 31st to thaw it to April 16th. A lot of the reason for the delay there was because we were dealing with that other one in South Anchorage and other emergencies at the same time.

We thawed about 200 feet of water main here. We did it by digging a valve here, this bend in the pipe. You see this dark blue line is the water main. And we basically jetted and steamed to the north and jetted and steamed to the east. And we got the customer back in water.

The very last one we had to defrost took us the longest. And again, it was backlogged because of the other two delays. It took us over 3 weeks to resolve. It was a commercial customer. This was the John Deere dealership, Craig Taylor Equipment.

It was a 9-foot-deep water main. Thought about 200 feet of main there.

So, frozen services were a big deal. Frozen water main were a big deal. Kind of the last category that was really significant was frozen sanitary sewer main. It's not uncommon for AWWU to have to defrost sanitary sewer main. Happens every winter.

To that end, we have what's called an icing route, where we take a truck like this, our sewer jetter truck, which has a tank of water and a high-powered jet head, and we clean 18 segments of main on a weekly basis. On a weekly basis to keep them free of ice. That's, that's a winter city recent occur— regular occurrence. What was different about the winter of 2025 and 2026 is we had to do it 2 times a week instead of 1 time a week. And so what that did is committed 2 out of 3 of our crews to this icing route, which gave us less flexibility to respond to other emergencies because we couldn't dedicate those employees to the other the other issues we were dealing with at the time, the frozen services and the frozen water main.

Here's an image of the icing routes. As you can see, they're kind of scattered all over the city. It's really more related to depth of COVID of those mains, of where they freeze up. The issues we had associated with the frozen sewer main, the biggest one was in Girdwood on Verber Way. We had a frozen main just north of this White green line is the sewer main, and these circles are the manholes.

The sewer main froze, and basically the flow from that main backed up into a house. And so we had a sanitary sewer overflow attributed to the frozen main. The other one was at Huffman Cars in South Anchorage. Same thing, we had a blockage here that was attributed to fats, oils, and grease and rags. But as our jet crews were jetting the main out, they observed ice coming out and also ice in the manhole, so we think that one froze too.

It created a backup right by Huffman Cars at a manhole up here in their parking area.

So, throughout all this, equipment failures and safety issues were one of our primary concerns. Some of these digs took our crews over 30 hours of working straight to address equipment freezes, water valves, hoses freezes. What we were doing is we were keeping that equipment in the cabs of our vehicles to try to keep it warm, to try to keep it de-iced, which is unusual. Because our equipment was in the cabs of the vehicle, we had to try to keep our people warm somehow. So, what you can see in this picture is this is one of our frost fighters that pumps hot, warm air into the trench excavation.

We set up a warming station for our staff to basically curl up underneath the hose and keep warm. And so, they would take shifts where they would work and they would go warm up when they needed to. I went to a job site and I was talking to some of the people and they were so cold they couldn't talk straight. So, it was really just keeping people and equipment warm was a huge, huge deal. We broke an excavator claw because we were trying to dig through hard ground and, you know, those things are solid steel and it broke.

So, frostbite, hypothermia, that type of thing, and equipment malfunctions were paramount to address. So, what are the lessons we learned? We need to do a lot more customer education and develop a lot more customer education materials. A lot of the stuff we have developed and on our website is associated with freezing internal to your home. What do you do if your pipe freezes in your basement?

We need to talk to our customers about what they do if their pipe freezes 10 feet underground and how the utility is going to react to that. We need to put it on our website. So we're working on that stuff now. Uh, as I talked about, just the location of services, that not only slowed us down and created frustration with our customers, but it also slowed thawing companies down. So if we can work with our customers to mark their service connection locations with a marker like the one you see on the right-hand side of the screen, that would help us respond faster and help everybody respond faster and minimize cost to the customer.

Also, what we learned is, is we're combing through the data now and trying to find the whys of what happened. Our data is there. But it's not necessarily clean enough for us to make quick assumptions. So we know we need to go through our forms and our processes and modify them so we can basically put data into categories to make it make sense, so we can make some, uh, some improvements to how we do business and how we respond to things. We also need to purchase more equipment to address service connection issues.

When I reflect on the winter of 2025 and 2026, I think of it as a prolonged natural disaster response. Uh, I was lucky enough to be a civil servant through the November 2018 earthquake and provide service to this community addressing that problem and COVID. Last winter for me, it was no different. Uh, we were in emergency response mode. Uh, we handled it the same way.

It was triage. Prioritize and address. And we had to put off a lot of work because of it. The customer expectation, they expect to be able to turn their water on and get service whenever they want to, and that just didn't happen last winter. So now we're adapting and responding to that to try to make things better and improve.

With that being said, if you've never seen an image of someone digging through frozen ground, that's what it looks like. It doesn't come out like separate degraded soil, it comes out as big chunks. And so that's, that's us digging. Does anybody have any questions and comments for me? Yeah, I believe we have a question from Member Handeland.

Thank you. Yeah, I'll try to keep my engineering questions brief here because I could go on for a while. So with those services, do you guys have any data on how many had actual, like, broken pipes? I mean, water— when water freezes, it expands by 9%, and so I didn't know if we also saw some issues with that, with any of those services. Yeah, so for the 247 I showed up, up there, that was strictly frozen services.

We also categorize our breaks that are in the 83 emergency responses that I showed you on that next data table that were associated with broken services. Or broken water main. As far as the freezing, you're right, the volume of water expands as you get closer to 32°F, but a lot more of our main breaks were associated with ground movement and shear, cast iron shear breaks, so, or corrosion holes in the service where you were just getting pinholes, so. For the biggest impact to us, it was strictly frozen services, but not breaks from freezing water. Okay.

And then I guess with that, because I saw in the one where it was, I mean, 1,000 feet there, are you guys going back and then kind of inspecting that to make sure that there's no breaks in that after you've got that line cleared? Yeah, on the water side, it's very easy because if there was a break, you would see the water surface or the water would come out of the trench we excavated to cut the pipe and dig it. So we did check those to verify there were no breaks associated with the water. For the sewer side, we have the ability to camera the main itself and look for breaks. Yeah, and so then the, the other one that I guess that was kind of just kind of concerning to me is, I mean, the fact that that one break where it's 11 feet down, I mean, it's over road, so the, the snowfall, I mean, theoretically, if clearing our roads, there should be at all times no, no snow cover.

And so that really wouldn't impact it. Is there, I guess, uh, future design considerations or something? I'm not sure if it was, hey, maybe some sloppy soil that got in there that was maybe frost susceptible or, um, something. But yeah, I mean, 11 feet down freezing is, I guess, a tad concerning. I'm not sure if there's ideas.

I, I under—. I think I understand your question. Uh, so you are absolutely correct. In the right-of-way, there's no snow coverage, so the depth of snow coverage doesn't necessarily impact it. That's really more for the on-property services and the frozen service that we issue.

We had— because a lot of those are under yards where there is snow cover, uh, we bury our main 10 feet deep to try to get below the frost depth. So last winter was unusual that the frost was getting down to 11 feet deep in those areas. Normal winters, that doesn't happen. Like I said, we've never experienced in my 20 years here frozen water main in the right-of-way like I showed you. But last winter, it happened 3 times, all within a couple of days of each other, and that was one of them.

As far as the considerations we're doing for how to address that and how to get better, I think it's more related to like the breakside and water temperature. And we're taking a look at water temperature and how we operate the system and our usage of working with Chugiak Electric and the heat exchanger to see how cold shock impacts cast iron pipe. So, we're doing that work right now. But the standard depth of 10 feet and the flow through the main every winter except for last one has accommodated preventing Maine from freezing. It's really the frozen service issues.

So does that help? I'll add to that too. I think, you know, a lot of these— you have other infrastructure like storm drains, for example, that are on top of that. Those are conduits for cold air. You know, they're essentially an open pipe that's, you know, 3 or 4 feet above ours.

And so that allows that frost prism to go down. The other thing that impacts that is dead-end water mains where you're not looped. And so if you don't have water continuously moving or you have slow movement, then water stagnates and has the potential to freeze. So in our design standards, looping water mains is one of the big things we do and making sure our depth of bury is where it needs to be. And a lot of times, these things were originally buried 10, 12 feet deep and then a road project or another project came in and the road was lowered or whatever.

And so a lot of times we're finding areas where we don't have that cover and so we're putting insulation on top. And just follow up with— so with the— when you have a culvert or something like that, isn't there some, I guess, kind of standard to put insulation and stuff between those? Is that, I guess, something relatively new, or that some of our older infrastructure maybe that doesn't impact? No, there's a standard specification for insulation. So when you're in between a storm drain, you want about 18 inches of separation distance between the 2 pipes.

And then you want 4 inches of insulation between them. And if you're not at a standard depth of 10 feet for a water main, there's also a standard to insulate over the water main to try to bring the R-value of ground above it to that 10-foot depth, basically. Okay, thanks. All right, next in the queue, Member Park. Thank you.

So looking at your incident map in Abbott Loop, my house is there. Apparently on this map it appears within, I'd say, 2 or 3 block radius, Abbott and 88th and 84th. You have about 8, 9 homes including mine, and there is an open culvert And, and I do want to say first of all that your crew was really good getting out and letting me know that it was my problem, which I appreciated. There are a very limited number of people who have the capacity to go and, and thaw the water line from the street to the house, and the one that I used when I first called, told me he had 75 people waiting ahead of me, and I cried. But other than that, do you have any way to provide resources to consumers, either to have a— maintain a list of people that can do the thawing, or in the alternative, perhaps when the weather is that cold, maybe have an advisory that goes out in the bill or something of that nature where you can say, we expect this might happen.

It would be useful if you leave a faucet dripping in your garage or your utility room or something of that nature.

Yeah, no, thanks for sharing your experience. Essentially what we're doing to address that, I talked about the customer education, the type of customer education documentation we're putting together right now is exactly what you're talking about, trying to tell people how to address things when they freeze deep.

So yeah, we're trying to put together better information to when we experience a winter like this, we can get the news out there and tell people what to do. That was also one of the reasons we made the map like this is to see if we had nodes and patterns. So we can kind of address those localized areas that might have an issue. We're taking a look at our regulation too and seeing if there's, there's ways we can make things easier for the customer, like especially for people that have like medical issues and things like that. But changing our regulation is a process itself.

It actually requires the Assembly. It requires the RCA. So, all of that stuff takes time. So, we are analyzing and we're working to put stuff together now, but it takes time to develop. So— Thank you.

And I'll just add to that too. One of the things that exacerbated the problem here within the municipality was that the Matanuska-Susitna Borough was in the same predicament with frozen septic and wells. So, there was— resources were spread throughout all of Southcentral, not just Anchorage. Everybody was dealing with this, and so it put a real strain on the private contractors that are in that line of work.

All right, next in the queue, Member Brawley. Oh, that's okay, just member here. Um, quick question, and then I apologize, I'll have to leave after this. I'm wondering, so Zooming out, this was a cold winter, we discussed the ice, all of that. I know in the context of roads, the other issue with having more ice is we see freeze-thaw cycles and that creates potholes and things.

So that's kind of the road story. I'm wondering, one, do these situations directly impact our roads? Obviously having water and other things underneath them, can you describe that relationship? And then are there other kind of big picture considerations beyond, again, if we have a cold winter and what you've mentioned, with the reality that we'll probably see more ice happening in the future, maybe not sustained cold but freeze thaw, because I don't know what that looks like for a water sewer utility. So, through the chair, the— I think the best answer to your question— I lost my train of thought here.

Holistically, you know, I think the temperature cycles are probably a bigger impact than anything, 'cause most, you know, all of our reservoirs with the exception of one or two are above ground, so they're susceptible to air temperatures. And we've noticed a lot, especially with, you know, we've talked about cast iron pipe, we have a lot of that. Temperature changes, particularly in water temperature and air temperature impact that a lot. And so with those freeze-thaw cycles, the big deltas in the temperature, I think, impact things more than anything. I thought, you know, with climate change and, you know, we're always— we're the deepest utility and we're very expensive because of that.

You know, there's opportunities maybe to lower that standard. But after going through a winter like this, I think reiterated that, you know, these cycles are probably going to get more, you know, bigger, bigger bands between the lows and the highs, and those will impact things more than anything. But they do. I mean, the road stuff. And Anchorage is a glacial dump of materials.

So you go from one place where you've got nice material to, you know, horrible frost-susceptible materials, and you have groundwater everywhere. And so it's extremely challenging. Thanks. Yeah, I just wanted to keep the big picture in mind. Thank you.

All right. I am— I have myself in the queue next. So you mentioned in your lessons learned consideration of potentially tariff modification for emergencies. Is that something that requires Assembly action? Yes, the Assembly approves those tariff modifications, and then we would submit those to the RCA and request approval.

And that's something we're looking at as part of this, particularly with being able to potentially waive those dispatch fees when we're in an emergency situation like that. Gotcha. And then I noticed under equipment, you have, you know, you're thinking about what do we need for for water mains for service thawing. I'm also curious if there's an additional staffing need if you are going to have those crews doing freeze work, and, you know, two-thirds of your folks are tied up in maintenance as opposed to responding to emergencies. Me and David are smiling at each other because I always say there's a staffing shortage and I always want more staff.

I mean, I have a— we maintain a backlog, especially for the service connection issues. As our infrastructure ages, as we experience weather swings like this winter, we get more and more emergencies we have to address. So, you know, I personally think O&M is understaffed and we need to staff up more to address these emergencies. That costs money, affects our budget. So I'll stop smiling and looking at you.

Which is why the director is sitting there going, stop, stop, stop. It all goes through the budget. And then my final question, I'm just thinking about, you know, what's a role that we can play in addition to those regulatory approvals? You know, would it be helpful for us to, you know, via the various channels we have to communicate with constituents to encourage people to find and mark their service locations before there's, you know, feet of snow on the ground? And are there other things that we could communicate to the public that would make your lives easier when we have these severe freeze-thaw and like cold weather events.

Yeah, I think Assemblymember Park brought it up, is what do you do if you have a recurring freezing issue? Like we had a couple of situations where customers on the water side would freeze up. It's still cold 10 feet down at that point, so they would shut their water off and then they would leave for the weekend. They come back and it was frozen again, and the cycle would start all over. Again, that just builds incredible frustration in that customer.

And so, talking to people about how to appropriately address what to do with your water, like keep it dripping. On the sewer side, we coordinated with Fairbanks and we got some input from them on how best to address, like, what do you do if you have recurring frozen sewer? And they, they gave us some insight on keeping like your tub full over the course of the day to build heat within that big slug of water. And then in the morning, basically flushing that through before you start using it so you prevent flash freezing. Putting that education out there and telling people about that.

I mean, one, we gotta figure out what we wanna do because we're set up a little bit differently than Fairbanks, but that's really the type of education and the type of stuff we need to decide on and we need to put out there. Well, I think I for one would look forward to seeing what kinds of recommendations you have so that we can help to be another mouthpiece to the community to let them know how they can be proactive. Next in the queue, member Scout. Thank you. So just to kind of zoom out a bit, why is sawing the responsibility of the consumer?

Is there like a section of code You can. So we're regulated by the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, and we have a— we're two separate utilities, a water utility and a sewer utility. And there's a tariff that governs everything we do. And then part of our tariff, that's a requirement, the service extension that goes from the property line to the homeowners, that's their— they own and maintain that, but they're also responsible for maintaining the service line from the main to the property. Okay, that's really interesting.

Just as we see this coming up more, um, another— so I noticed just in the frozen water mains that you discussed, like the curling club, the John Deere dealership, is there a reason that these are happening at bigger businesses and not residential properties?

Good. Uh, so if you look at the configuration of Maine for the Curling Club, uh, what you can see is the Curling Club is a business that doesn't use their service frequently. I mean, I don't even think they're operating every day, but they're definitely not operating 24 hours a day. Uh, if you trace their line back they have a very long shallow berry section of service and main before they get to where there's more flow and more services. So I think that's one of the primary reasons they froze up is because of the shallow berry and also the, that intermittent usage.

So I think a lot of the reasons the businesses froze up versus is because of they wouldn't be operating during the weekend, so no one was using those services. Okay, great. Um, and then one thing too that I'm thinking about in terms of just like preparation, if we have a lack of contractors who are set up to provide these thawing services, um, is this something that we as a municipality could communicate out to the business community, to these types of contractors, folks who do snow removal, those kinds of things, and say like, hey, we would highly encourage more people to, you know, get the professional skills, whatever. I don't know what is required to be a thawing company, um, but is that something we could provide support on from AWWU or the municipal Municipality advising folks to do this? We have a pretty good relationship with the contractors and thawing companies that do, do work with us.

We communicate with them on a daily basis during the work week. So as far as the thawing companies, I think because of what happened last year, that was very visible. So I do think they The private industry got the message that if we have another winter like this, there's not enough equipment out there. I do— one of the pieces of equipment I talked about buying was more thawing equipment for us for when we get into those special circumstances to be able to respond. But if we tried to thaw every service right now, we couldn't respond to breaks or other bigger emergencies, and it would be a problem.

Totally. Okay, thank you. Quick time check. It's 12:03 and we have a couple of other standing items to manage. So, Member Park, final words?

Yeah, to Member Scout, just, just because I have experience working in water treatment industry, typically the, the portion of the piping from the street to the house was not put in by EWU, it's put in by the contractor that built the home.

All right, I see no further questions and nothing from folks on the phone, so thank you all very much for your work and please stay warm this winter. Thank you.

We have our port director and engineer coming to join us.

All right, gentlemen, as you are getting settled, please introduce yourselves for the record and begin whenever you are ready.

Terry Amatam, Director of the Don Young Port of Alaska. Eric Adams, Jacobs Program Manager for the PAMP. Just a quick update we'll go over. There's actually 3 items that are going to request to be in front of the assembly in the September meeting, and we'll move pretty quickly because I know there's another person. So if I'm going fast and you have questions, please stop me.

Okay, agenda, we'll just give a quick update of the Terminal 1 update, the electrical substation project, the north extension helipad, T2 design, and then the 5th item I mentioned, items upcoming at the assembly meetings, most likely the September 15th one. So here's just a shot of the photos down there. Pile installation is now in full swing. Over the last week, they're averaging about 1 a day, which is faster than what they planned, and so they're picking up speed and moving forward pretty great. Pretty, pretty fast.

Demolition of PL-1 is just about complete. You can see the concrete there at the bottom right. Then deep soil mixing is continuing at the new terminal. Truss 1A, we're about 85% done with that, and so we should look to wrap that up ahead of schedule on the deep soil mixing this year. Here's just a shot if you guys, if the assembly or anybody goes down there.

There's 3 piling, permanent piling. That's what it looks like. The fourth one that's going in in the upper right of the screen, and that's the pattern you'll see throughout the entire dock build there.

Just a photo of the demolition of the old dock, just for awareness. Electrical substation project, which is part of this civil— best foundation is 95% design's under review. I will start construction early September. Duct bank design is due the end of this month. And construction next year.

And then the entire electrical substation, best 95% design is due just before Christmas. North Extension helipad project received multiple proposals and will be evaluated soon. Construction will be in 2027. Just a reminder, this is the PIDB grant funds that will be funding this. Terminal 2 design, which is next, next cargo terminal, working towards 35% design due in September.

We'll have a stakeholder review effort planned for October. We're specifically looking at construction phasing to minimize disruption to ops, and a couple special studies of field bursts available, available during the petroleum terminal construction, which is after Terminal 2. Okay, the main items that we're going to have coming before the assembly in September is the Terminal 1 designer of record, GHD/WSA. USP. Every year I got to come back and ask for change order authority.

This will occur throughout the T1 construction. That's for them to provide services during construction, submittal review, RFIs, going to the fab shop and making sure everything's built according to the plans and specs. This request will be for about $2.1 million, and that will be in the September 15th goal for that meeting. The second item that will be in front of the committee, the assembly, is the FY 2025 PIDP grant acceptance for the petroleum terminal replacement. We got a grant for $4.725 million as our share, and so we'll be asking for you guys to approve so that the city can accept it when we get the grant.

That's standard process every year. You guys, if we get a grant, you guys see that. And then the last item is actually a Port item, and I can speak to it, or Terry can, is the POA AT&T, the address 505 East Plus Drive lease extension. That's basically a lease agreement with AT&T, adds 2 additional 5-year renewal options, potentially extending the lease through 2041. Future renewal term rents will be adjusted as provided on the lease agreement.

And Muni Code, ensuring that the Muni continues to receive fair market value rent over the extended lease term. So these 3 items will be in front of the Assembly in September, one of the September meetings.

Any questions? All right, questions from members, quick and dirty. One item to just preview what is hopefully going to be coming as a report to this body at our next meeting. Some of you may have seen emails from constituents who have been concerned about tariff increases at the port, how that's impacting Alaskan consumers and businesses, and asking some questions about essentially the port plan of finance and how it— how we are paying for this bad boy. So Mr. Amatam, Director Amatam, has a really outstanding report in hand that is talking— that discusses the, the various types of grant funding that we've applied for, for this project, and why we have applied for certain things and why we haven't applied for other grant funds that have been available.

So there's a whole strategy to this, um, that is really well thought out, and, and I'm hopeful that he will come in and present that to us maybe next month or the following month here at this committee, because it is well worth our time. It's something that I think really all of us us ought to be aware of, um, as we are thinking about the, the future of this project. Um, just a quick commentary on that. Uh, we were talking about it this morning with the plan of finance being redone, uh, over the next couple of weeks. It might be too much information for one meeting.

I was hoping to kind of roll it out all together— the grant narrative, the history of the grants, and the strategy going forward— and then also the plan of finance. Probably try to break that up for you guys. It's going to be pretty complicated, and I think it's a lot of information, and we don't want to sort of muddy the water between the two. Yeah, I think that sounds great. Um, and again, to reiterate for members, all, all of the funding that we receive goes to offset the cost to, to our communities, not just Anchorage but all across Alaska.

So we all have a vested interest in ensuring that we are pulling in as many federal and state dollars as we possibly can. To try to keep the tariffs reasonable for all of us. So anyway, thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you for the update. And let's move on to Solid Waste Services, I believe, has an update for us as well.

And just looking at the time, it is 12:11. I would Um, would it be okay with members if we extended to 12:20 today? Okay, great. All right, um, well, the fast is great, but go for complete also. Thank you, Director Toth.

Go ahead, introduce yourself for the record, and we'll get rolling. Thank you, Chair Baldwin-Day. Uh, Kelly Toth, Director of Solid Waste Services. Members of the assembly, um, I'm going to start today, just give you a couple of quick updates on the solid waste services And then we're going to pass this over to Terry from Raftelis, who will continue it on. So, Terry.

There, I can operate it. Good afternoon, everyone. For the record, my name is Terry Bovary with Raftelis, and we have a brief presentation to provide you today concerning the financial condition for the Solid Waste Enterprise funds. So we're gonna run you through a quick background, our preliminary findings, and then recommendations and next steps.

This provides a brief overview.

Should we? Okay. Okay. So what we went ahead and did is we developed a 10-year financial forecast, and we actually did this a number of years ago. So we're going to talk a little bit about the findings from that previous study, how does it compare to this study, and then we're going to talk about how we identify full cost of service, our methodology, and ultimately what we're trying to do is ensure the fiscally sustainable operations of, uh, Salt Waste Services, achieving all the financial objectives.

This provides you an overview of our methodology. The image on the right shows our gross revenues, our user fees, our tip fees, our monthly collection fees that we charge our customers. We have two separate enterprise funds. We have a disposal enterprise fund and collection enterprise fund to account for the different services that we provide. And then we have our expenditures on the other side.

And so those expenditures generally relate to operating costs and our capital needs. Obviously, the disposal fund is much more capital intensive, as you can imagine, with the landfill, the transfer station, the hazardous waste facility and recycling center. So all of these things require capital along with our, our long, long haul vehicles. And then on the collection side, we have our fleet that we're responsible for as well. And so we want to make sure that we can identify what are those costs on a recurring basis.

And simply stated, you know, we're trying to make sure that our revenues are covering our expenditures because We're an enterprise funding, and what that means is that we have to ensure that the fees cover the cost service. And that lastly, I just want to mention that this is a data-driven process. When we build these financial models, they rely on multiple years of historical data, billing statistics, and we work very closely with staff. We appreciate their efforts in getting us all the data that— to drive the analysis.

I'm going to skip over the prior slide and just jump to a comparison for— just to save a little bit of time, but still will ensure completeness. We have a comparison of the actual expenses from the prior study, or, excuse me, actual results in blue versus in gray represents what we had projected back 2021. And what we want to report, uh, to this committee and to the assembly is that, um, as you can imagine, since 2021 we've had a number of events, including inflation that's really picked up pace. And, um, in 2025 and 2026, there's a chart on the top representing the disposal fund, shows a delta of about $5 million or so by 2026. And I think that SWS could be commended for maintaining general alignment with this financial plan over the last several years, even in light of the fact that we've had a lot of inflation in operations, but also that, you know, we, we do have some budget unfilled positions and other kind of cost and drivers associated with the operations.

And so what we find ourselves in 2026 is a a pretty big delta. Give me one second.

We are pausing to deal with some tech things.

Sorry, picking back up. Apologize, I believe there's a— we loaded up an older version of the PowerPoint and just want to make sure we were presenting the correct information. So some of the information on this slide that you can C breaks down the $5 million shortfall in the disposal fund through the IGC, which is indirect costs, labor costs, and professional services was a big element of the differential since the prior study. And that all relates to some of the pressures that Solid Waste Services has been seeing as it relates to regulatory drivers and the need to address Merrill Field and some of these other improvements that I believe Ms. Toth has presented in past to the committee and the assembly. Um, the collection fund also is somewhat similar but doesn't have as large of a differential that we saw.

Uh, but the point here that we're trying to express through a comparison of the prior study to this updated study and actuals and where we're at is that, uh, we've observed more rate pressures, um, on the system. And we're not at the point right now where we're ready to provide a formal recommendation concerning the rates. But we definitely have pressures driving the need to reevaluate and possibly look at further adjustments in future years because of this shortfall that we're seeing on the operating expense side. And we do have some caveats that we want to bring to your attention in— when we're concluding. But before we jump there— sorry, before we jump there, I just want to touch on a comparison of the capital needs of the system, and you can kind of see what we had forecasted back in the '21 study when we looked to the current 5-year period around $35 million, and where we're at today is around $53 million.

So we have a pretty big jump in the overall amount of capital spending identified in the current financial plan versus where we were at last time. So this is another piece of evidence of pressure to the finances. This provides a 10-year look at the disposal fund. And the dotted line represents our revenues with the adopted increases thus far. And so you can kind of see the shortfalls will build over time.

And again, we're still evaluating, we're waiting for the '25 actuals, audited financial statements to come out to ensure we know what the true fiscal position for the enterprise fund is before making any decisions. And then here's a look at the collection fund, kind of similar.

So I'll try to wrap up the presentation just by saying that at this particular time we're not making any requests, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye. One of the reasons why is that, you know, the municipality is looking at some capital investments potentially in the coming years, and we want to ensure that we provide recommendations that are going to put the enterprise fund in a fiscally sustainable position and, um, present well should it seek to go to the market for financing for other types of projects in the future. Um, so those are kind of some considerations driving, uh, the need to look more closely at the enterprise fund and address some of these shortfalls and pressures that we're seeing. And, um, we're hoping to come back and give you more information as soon as it becomes available. I believe talking with Ms. Hoth that we should have some financials in the next month or two.

And in addition to that, just a minor point that, you know, based on some operations at the transfer station, we're looking at possibly bringing forward a recommendation to adjust the way that we recover some fees for self-hauls. They tend— the way it works right now is we have a recycling and a healthy spaces surcharge. And that can be regressive to customers coming through the scales because it's a flat fee. So what we're looking to do is make it much like a percentage-based fee. So we'll be bringing back a more formal proposal around that to increase equity for your ratepayers.

I think you're seeing nods around the table on that one. So thank you. Questions from members?

All right, I see no questions.

So reassess the rate needs in 2027. Does that mean you would be coming back to us with some suggestions about the same timeframe, or at what point in the next year do you think that we would hear an update from you? Chair Palomde, at this point we are going to take a look at what the 2025 financials look like and then assess from there. Let you know how soon those decisions can be made. All right.

Thank you. I don't see any other questions, so thank you so much for being here. We appreciate the presentation. Look forward to those recommendations. And I think we are— there's nobody here for comment, so we are adjourned.

Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.