Good afternoon everybody. I'll call the order the uh public utilities commission meeting for Tuesday, April 22nd uh 2025. The first item on our agenda is our consent agenda. Does anybody have any questions on that?
[Music] I'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second. Is there um any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I.
I. Opposed? Motion carries. Next item is our employee of the month recognition. Yes, commissioners. Uh our employee of the month uh for March is Baylor Krauss. Uh Baylor is actually um the newest member of our natural gas team. Um
Baylor has done an excellent job of completing the required operator qualification certificates that he needs and his class A commercial driver's license. Um Baylor's always ready to help with the project, eager to learn more about the operation of the department and his plumbing skills are
very valuable. His hard work and effort to make the department a better place is appreciated. So congratulations to uh Baylor Krauss. Congratulations. I'll make the motion to recognize Joe Weber as employee of the month for February. Baylor Krauss or Baylor
Krauss. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm in the wrong place. Employee of the month for March. March. Yes. Of 2025. I'll second that motion. All right. We have a motion, a second. Is there any further discussion? If not, all in favor
say I. I. Opposed? Motion carries. Now we move on to new business. Um the Aurora Endpoint Defense. Uh yes, commissioners. This is um part of the IT department. Um they went out um and got
quotes uh for the endpoint defense. Ended up um deciding to go with Artic Wolf. Um Artic Wolf also is our uh managed and detection response services. So this contract will align with that one. um you agreed to a three-year
contract for the Arctic Wolf Wolf Managed and Detection and Response Services back in uh August of 2024. Um this is a budgeted item and um it comes the I guess it would be two years comes
under budget at 8215. Make a motion to receive an order filed the quote provided by ESG for Aurora Endpoint Defense by Arctic Wolf in the amount of $2,925. I'll second that. All right, we have a motion and a second. Is there any
further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I. Motion carries. Dan, I believe you're up. Uh yeah, it's that time of year again for the new ALM electric system reliability standards. This is something
we do every year. So for those of you that have seen this several times, I'm sorry, but for the new members, we'll kind of walk through it in detail. Good to go through it. Y um obviously this for 2024 simple diff just some quick
definitions to start off. Simply the answer is is the power there when it's needed when and where it's needed. This is how we benchmark our system compare against other entities. It's something that the state started for IUS years ago. It's kind of voluntary that we do
it, but a lot of other MMUA and APA members do it. You'll see that further on in the presentation. And obviously, uh, we use the AA's e-reia tracker. They give us a real nice little report and stuff that
explains how we compare against our colleagues and competitors. There's three basic things we really look at and that's the safety is one of them. It's the system average interruptions frequency index. It's total number of interact interruptions
divided by the total number of customers. And this math ends up being kind of important later on. So sad is the duration divided by the total number of customers. So how the sum of how long all those interruptions were divided
over the number of customers. And the last one is the customer average interruption duration index for Katie. Sum of the interruptions divided by the total number of interruptions. So add up every how long they all were divided by the number of them. So it's just an
average of them. And this year again, New Alm for our safety is freakishly good. I mean, you can't hardly get better than 0.01. Um, the one I like to compare us to is region three because that's
utilities about the same size as us in real in the e-reia tracker. It doesn't say who it is. Later on, you're going to see um this is Newm's history here. Then we compare ourselves to Ottertale Power. They're always a year behind schedule
because of their reporting and stuff. And then Excel Energy. Well, Excel Energy is such a huge animal. It's kind of not apples to apples or whatever. So, last year we thought we did good at 0.02. Well, we did twice as good at 0.01
now. So, I don't know what else to say about it. Any questions? Well, here's a graph of that. And you can see the one thing you'll see some spikes here and there when no has a big spike. New's usually got such a small footprint. One
major weather event or one major event can really mess up your numbers because you know we're only about 10 miles long and Excel is I have no idea how long they got. Square miles that are in the hundreds of
thousands of square miles probably. So um this is sad again sum of the durations divided by number of customers. So if you're an average customer you were out for less than a minute8 of a minute. So that sounds
pretty good. Uh again region three utilities of about our size they average 50 minutes. So I think we're doing pretty good. Again we've got a great history. You know, obviously certain years we have things happen that cause a
spike. And one thing you should mention is we always consider a weather event because a lot of these are weather tied. You think of a snow or a storm in the middle of summer, uh, tornado, whatever. I can't remember which year, but one year we actually
had during wickedly cold, we had a couple switches fail that caused an outage. So it was just a winter deal, you know, February 20 below for a week straight, we had a switch fail up in an industrial park that really messed up our numbers right out of the gate. So we
always think summer, but there is actually other events that can kind of really mess it up for everyone. Again, you look at our numbers, we look really, really good. Um, Gaty is a little different.
Here's where the math comes up. You notice it's the sum of the interruption durations divided by the total number of interruptions. And here's where the truth's going to come out. You go, "Wow, 95. We're we're still doing okay, but we're not looking near as
good. We had four interruptions is all we had. So, we divided the number by four that were reportable. So, we kind of a nuance to the math. It's just so low it skews the number again. But again, we look really, really good.
Again, 2020, I can't remember right off the what that event was, but obviously that was a weather generated event. And you look at the graph again here, we're pretty close to that region three folks. You know, we're kind of
tracking with them other than spikes, but otherwise, again, we're really, really doing a nice job, I think. And here's our outages. And you see here's where one customer was impacted, but it was for 132 minutes. So we pro I
think that's one we had to run a temporary service because it was in the middle of winter. Underground cable went out. Here's another one customer, but it was 108 minutes long. So it was a complicated problem to fix, but it was only for one customer. We had one transformer and
that was our big outage. It impacted three customers. So don't worry next year I'm better knock on wood I'm probably jinxing myself it won't be as easy next year. And then we had one more equipment failure that was we had a great year you
know and that's we do a lot of uh some of the reasons we are doing well cable are proactive versus reactive maintenance replacing cable in our overhead part of our system. We're always going after tree
trim and keeping things in good shape. Pole test or Osmos pole testing to make sure the poles are still in good health. And every five years we do relay and breakers and switch testing. This is the year it's due. We will be doing that later this year
again. And then couple projects that I left on here from last year that we actually have finished up. We did the Center Street bypass project. Well, we're now working on generator 4 and we actually ended up using that bypass to do some reconfiguration to kill the high
side of the Center Street substation. So, the money everybody spent is going to good use. It's not just sitting there doing nothing. We've done some corrective action. We've got a breaker that were got everything here except for a couple of minor parts that are on back
order. They were supposed to be here in March and didn't make it. So, and it's something we can only do in shoulder months. So, we'll probably end up doing that in October or November. And we've done all of our substation RTUs now, which is a significant accomplishment because when we started that, we were
informed by our consultant that we were beyond obsolete. That's never a comforting thought, but we've only got two very minor ones to do. The major stuff is already done. So now we got a bunch of future projects here where we
got some relays. Our last full substation is the southside sub. Half of them have to be completed and that is in the budget to get that done. Transformer upgrade. We are working on that power plant substation switch gear.
We have several of them. One of them we did this winter. There'll be more of them coming. And these are the last two RTUs. Again, these are more observation RTUs. The main RTUs that are important are already done. One is just reporting to Hartland and one is
for the West Excel substation, but that is normally our normal open. So, we have nothing going through there, but when we do close it, we do need to upgrade that one. Some more keys planning, you know, we planned maintenance and again like we're
doing our generator 7 controls right now. The replacement project, 20-year system plans, we'll be doing another 20-year study about every 10 years to keep us current. Building redundancy, backing up looping systems wherever we
can. Underground components in areas susceptible to major wind shear and stuff like that and SCADA system upgrades. so we know what's going on on our system. Other keys are just our operators recognizing the problems, take
appropriate restoration steps relatively quickly, training, and again, we've had some people working hard for a long time. So, it's good to keep them people around. And we got backup even on our power delivery 23rd North, we got a second backup coming from the greater
grid. So if one goes down, we can keep oursel going along with our generation. And here's our steam capacity and our combustion turbine capacity at 71 megawatts. Um we make it happen keeping
our maintenance. We have a fairly aggressive and maintenance budget. We keep keep after it. Redundant circuits, like I keep saying, backing everything up one way or another. Again, I'm undergrounding and we have local generation and good
technicians. Conclusions. Here's the math to it, but we're stacking up very well against both the IUs and our colleagues. And I did make one mistake. We actually got this award on the last bullet point for 24 also. I did not
update that. It should say 24 also. Any questions? Are we part of region three? Yeah, it's generally sorry kind of the five state area here. So it's Minnesota. There's a little in the report there's a little
map. It's Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, part of Iowa and Wisconsin in that. And then do we ever call our like local people to see what their data is like whether it's Hutch or Oatana or Albertly? No, we've never just for comparison. Not everybody even does.
It's optional for municipals to even do this. So I don't even know if everybody does. This is just a nice report that yeah, it's hard to lay your hands on the numbers and absolutely and like I said the I use it's no small feat to find those numbers. They I think they
deliberately bury them a little bit. No, it shows that things are going well and the maintenance is happening which is key. When you do your testing this spring for breaker testing, is there any service issues to customers when that happens? We had a technician many years ago, a
contractor mess up and didn't put it on bypass and dump some stuff. And trust me, our substation technician will not be able they'll have training wheels on there this time. Sorry.
But any other questions or comments? No, numbers are good. I make a motion to receive and reporter file the report regarding new homes electric system reliability standards and for 2024 and acknowledgement of the 2024 certificate of excellence and
reliability from the American. Is that better? I'll second. All right, we have a motion and a second. Um, is there any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I. I. opposed. Motion passes. Thank you, Dan. Next item is uh scope engineering
scope for sanitary sewer force main design. Yes, commissioners. Um we had a wastewater treatment facilities infrastructure conditions analysis done. Out of that came a facilities plan. Um part of that plan identified as the
force man sanitary sewer force man as being aged and close to end of life. Um so this is engineering services for that. Um in that analysis they identified um alternatives a do nothing
alternative a um rehab alternative and then a replacement alternative. And um the best improvement option for the utility was a a replacement. And so this engineering is for um a parallel um
sanitary sewer main to follow um or to be parallel to the existing one that goes from 20th lift station to uh the wastewater treatment plant. This uh force man actually carries 99% of the
wastewater from the city of NWAM to the wastewater treatment plant. So it's critical infrastructure. Um we have um I've gone and um requested federal
funding from so far um I've sent in um a request to Clolobashar um to Finstead as well as Smith's office. So hopefully um this may be in some we might get some type of federal funding but prior to
doing that we need to do the engineering um to make sure that we get this completed and done in the timely manner that's needed. So this is an unbudgeted item um because you know I guess we didn't fe think that we were going to be
doing the engineering this year we would be doing it next year. Uh but we have adequate uh reserves in this fund for the proposal. Um I think that's it. Do you have any questions? When would construction likely take place if um
well if we get federal funding and that's and this is dependent on federal funding. Um if we don't get federal funding this year, we'll reapply again next year. Um but um it actually is only a one-year construction time frame. And
so we'll find out in October of 25 whether we get the funding. if we have if we do get the funding, we have to be done by um September of 2026. So that's why we need to do the engineering now um and not wait because the engineering is
going to take probably three four months to get done. So okay, I'll entertain a motion on that. I'll make the motion to authorize the city manager to accept the proposal from Bolton and Mink for the engineering and design of the sanitary sewer force main
in the amount of $270,000 and enter into an agreement for services on the new public utilities standard consultant services agreement. I'll second that. We have a motion and a second. Is there
any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I opposed. Motion carries. Um, next item is a steam pressure pipe. Little pressure steam pipe. Yeah, we had a a what it was was an old
spool piece and a manhole fail kind of behind the bakery over a few blocks away. We have isolated that chunk of line and it is out of service right now. This is just ordering one full length stick of 40ft pipe. We're going to take and totally replace it. totally remove
the old manhole. It's obsolete. We don't need it anymore. And get that back line back into service. Then it'll be back to being looped across the post office front of the bakery and come back to the power plant. Right now it is two radial feeds and it's obviously we would prefer
to have it looped for redundancy for everybody involved. And we did have money in the budget in a in a low pressure steam project. So it is some this wasn't the project plan but we do have money in the budget to do something with this.
Any other questions? The 10 and 3/4 inch pipe. Is that what that is? That's what it says is. Yeah. The steam sizes get a little weird. They it cuz with all the insulation and stuff, the pipe looks like it's about this big, but you take off about six
inches of insulation and they got a jacket. So yeah, the outside diameter should be about 10 and 3/4. No, I just thought that was interesting. All right, I'll entertain a motion from I'll make the motion to receive an order filed the quote from RE Carlson
Incorporated for low pressure steam pipe in the amount of $10,900. I'll second. All right, we have a motion and a second. Um, is there any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I opposed. Motion carries. Um, next item
on the agenda is the water department valves and installation. Yeah, this is um one is the the 18 in is the main plant valve leaving the plant going to the greater system no longer holds. So now they have to go out in the
street and close it and the plant valve should be working. So the plant plant was built in 1992. So the valves are getting to beyond their design working life. So that's one of them. And then the five smaller valves are actually the
under drains. We're currently doing a condition assessment. And we were planning on doing a filter media upgrade, but along the way we probably won't need to do the media upgrade, but we did find out that those valves aren't workable. So it's pro again going around
refreshing everything these all these valves we had 100,000 for some other valves in the zerk in the budget so this is budgeted we probably won't be doing those other valves but we are actively going through the
plant assessing things looking for things exactly like this that are starting to fail after 30 years of work. So, this is just kind of setting up to do future projects. So, things are working. Pull the filters down and
needed extended maintenance, we'll call it, or it's a big valve. 18 in. Mhm. Yeah. And none of them are cheap, so but they work every day. So, Yep. That's what you need, right? I'll make a motion to receive an
order filed the quote from Vesco Incorporated for Desert Butterfly valves in the amount of $11,370 and for the quote from uh Minnesota Mechanical Solutions Incorporated MMS for the installation of these valves in the amount of
$9,223.88 for a total cost of $20,593.88. I'll second. All right. Uh we have a motion and a second. Is there any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I. Opposed. Motion carries. Um, last item on the new
business is well 20 and 21 redevelopment. Okay, this project actually was not budgeted. Um, we have in previous conversations told you well 23 and 22 are slated to be being rebuilt right
now. the permitting process and things are not going as efficiently as we would like to have had them or as smoothly. This is a project to get these two wells in the best possible shape for the summer and to carry us through till that
well project is done. Right now the last we're filing our permits now getting our stuff in line but the last I talked to the contractor he had a seven sevenmonth waiting list to get on. So, we're looking at winter construction for this and
obviously summer now and get a flood next year. Well, it'd be good to have these in as good of possible so we don't have any other issues. So, 20 and 21 take 7 months for permitting. No, no. 22 and 23. I'm sorry. This we can just do
right now. Okay. There's no kind of a backup plan to make sure this is getting us in as good a shape with the rest of our wells as possible. Got it. Waiting for the other two to come back. And as a point, I talked to the contractor. We give them notice proceed within two weeks. They'll probably be out there
mobilized and working on it. So, we're trying to get it up and being done with it. Maybe before the end of May, definitely early June with both of them. They're going to do one and then the other. Sorry. Sorry. As the wells go, they lose efficiency and so they lose
the amount of water that they can produce. And so, that's what the redevelopment does. it brings it back up to what its rated capacity would be. And um you know with with the potential of having less available water um in the
summer due to 22 and 23 being done, Dan um felt that getting wells 20 and 21 back up to where they could be is just a a good idea. Just a little extra protection. We don't know what the summer is going to be like, you know, if we have a drought season or anything
like that. So, um, it's not that we don't have enough water, but this is just protection to make sure that we have a little wider margin than what than what we would have. Yeah, that's a large increase from from where they're at today, from where they first started. Well, you know, these wells are in their
70s. So, this was uh they probably were better than that when they were new. But, yeah, over what is that about nine years, they've lost significant amount. We're just trying to claim some of this back. And the gentleman that developed this spec is a hydrogeeologist that helped us develop well 27. Okay. And
that's another hive producer. These two are two of our bigger producing wells. That's And they actually were on our schedule to be rehabbed at some point. We're just kind of moving them up. Have we done this process to them before? Like how often does that happen where we
do the cleaning and redevelopment? We we've tried in the past they've tried to do it as they see them drop off. We're trying to put a more uh regimented regime into how often we're doing it and maybe being a little more aggressive, not letting them get as far out of
balance, shall we say. So, we're confident that that'll bring those back up in that process to Nobody will guarantee that it's going to come back to new, but it should have a significant improvement. Okay. All right.
I'll take a motion on that. I'll make the motion to authorize the city manager to accept the quote from Trout Companies for cleaning and redevelopment of wells 20 and 21 in the amount of $68,500. I'll second that. We have a motion and a
second. Um, is there any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I. Opposed? Motion carries. Last item is our report of claims. I'll make the motion to accept the list of claims paid in the amount of
3,86,21.31. A second. All right. Motion and a second. Is there any further discussion? If not, all in favor say I. I. Opposed? Motion carries. Um, is there any further any comments from our commissioners at this time? If not, meeting adjourned.
Thank you everybody. It's okay.