RWSA Board of Directors Meeting   7/23/2024

So we will open.

We need a motion.

A motion to recess.

Second.

OK. We have a motion and a second to recess solid waste.

All in favor.

Aye.

Opposed?

OK. We are in recess and solid waste.

We will open.

We will wait for the changing of the guard.

The Board of Directors meeting of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

And the first item is approval of the agenda with amended H is changing utilities, the public works department.

I think we can still go forward with that, Mr. Chairman, because we have all members of the Water and Sewer Board.

We do it both in August, September.

okay the bylaws when it looks like the meeting minutes were amended as well yeah okay in the meeting minutes line 578 add the word on for those Ms. Malek stated that it was astonishing to see how lawn chairs and other belongings

disappeared from people's property only to be found later at a height of eight feet above on the road.

Second.

Okay, we motion a second to approve the agenda.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Okay, the agenda is approved.

We will go on to the minutes of the previous board meeting.

Okay, we have a motion.

Do we have a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Okay, motion passes.

Mr. Chairman, if we could recognize, we would appreciate Michael Schwartz joining us today in place of Valerie.

She was out of town.

He's with Williams Mullen and our new member, Quinn Lunsford.

Welcome, Quin.

Now you're an official voting member, so congratulations.

Yes.

That's it.

Otherwise, no recognition, Mr. Chairman.

So my report, we were pleased to have another internship program this summer.

We have four really outstanding interns who worked with us, and I think they're all here today.

Come on up, King.

Go ahead.

I'll go first.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Jenny.

I spent the beginning of my summer down at wastewater, just following around the operators.

And now I've been spending a lot of time up in admin doing communications work, starting our Instagram, which I do have a QR code for here.

So if you want to pass that around, maybe send it to your families who might be interested or on social media.

I'm looking right now, we're sitting at 44 followers.

I'm looking to get 200 by the time that I am done here, which is in two and a half weeks.

So we've got to accelerate that process.

Um, yeah.

And then I'm going to keep doing, once I go back to school, I'm a student at William & Mary, English and environmental science.

Once I go back to school, I'm going to stay, um, in touch with Betsy and do like five hours a week.

Thank you guys.

Hi, I'm Ben.

I'm studying data analytics and computer science at Virginia Tech right now and I'm a SCADA and IT intern so I spent a lot of time with Will and Tanner and I've gotten a lot really relevant

Nice.

Great.

Yeah.

That's good.

I'm Sophia.

I am a biochem major at Catawba College.

And I'm working with Michael Webb a bunch.

And I'm doing water and then split time with Vlad.

So it's been fun to be able to like collect the samples and then go immediately test them in the lab.

So like see the results of what I've been working on.

Great.

Thanks.

My name is Florence Pinkston.

I'm working here as an intern in the wastewater treatment plant here at Moores Creek.

I've been shadowing the wastewater operators here at the plant and learning sort of what they do and how they do it.

I'm a graduate from Piedmont Virginia Community College as of last summer and I'm hoping to get into environmental science and conservation and stewardship type work.

We're quite an outstanding group this summer.

Very smart and engaging.

So that internship program continues to pay rewards for us.

So back to succession management, you know, the board approved it, a deputy executive director position, or let me hold on to that.

Do you have me?

Okay, we'll get to the job in just a second.

But we've hired a firm called PolyHire out of Washington, DC, and they're going to help us recruit for the deputy executive director position.

We also are

soliciting for a compensation and classification study for the water and sewer authority as well as the solid waste.

And we hope to have that information by the end of this calendar year so we can include it in the budget for next year.

Now, under a strategic plan priority of environmental stewardship, a drought has been a topic on a lot of people's minds up late.

And this is the report I would offer today.

The National Weather Service through Wakefield, Virginia on the map shows, Virginia has the record driest weather in June in the country.

And then when you look across the charts, it will tell you that the state had the greatest weather

this lowest precipitation in 130 years.

Charlottesville had the third lowest in 130 years and Albemarle County had the fourth lowest precipitation in 130 years in June of 2024.

Another U.S. drought map shows that our county has moved from a moderate to a severe drought.

And you can see the red being extreme drought and it's kind of moving from west to east across our state at the moment.

Further, the Virginia DEQ map

now shows Albemarle County has progressed from a watch as it was last month in yellow to the brown color and is in a warning status.

Although other parts of the Middle James District are still in the warning and yet all of the four factors of precipitation, groundwater levels, reservoir levels and stream flow levels are still in the green box which means normal

within those categories.

So these analyses are taken in various locations around our middle change area, such as the groundwater is measured in Buckingham, the stream flow is monitored in the Appomattox River near Farmville,

Now the reservoir levels monitor our reservoirs.

We have five of the six monitoring sites in our region, or our five reservoirs, and they're rated as normal.

Precipitation, I couldn't find where that was monitored, so I'm not sure where that comes from, but that also is rated in a green box as normal within our district.

So we look at those three maps, we look at the

10 day forecast, and the good news is the weather has been cooler recently, it's supposed to be cooler for the next 10 days, showers maybe on Thursday, but no significant rain in the 10 days.

Our drought model, we've had our consultant run that, and that indicates we have reached the trigger at the South Rivanna Reservoir to go into a warning stage, which means that we have greater than a 10% chance

that the South Rivanna Reservoir will be less than 70% full within 10 weeks.

So those are factors.

Now on a more positive note.

Did you say that last time?

It's a mouthful, right Brian?

Go through the model.

It measures whether the reservoir has a greater than 10% chance of being less than 70% full

within the next 10 weeks.

Just South Rivanna.

As I've said in the past, we key on South Rivanna because we have to get water from South Rivanna.

We cannot get enough water out of an observatory treatment plant to supply the entire urban area.

And as an example, today, as of midnight last night,

We had backed South Rivanna Water Crew Plant down to about 6 million gallons a day production.

An observatory was up to 4 million, which is about all we can get out of observatory because that's all we can get to observatory through the older pipeline from Ragged Reservoir to the plant and from the plant out into the system.

Hence why we have the two major pipe construction projects to replace both of those pipes.

Ragged to Observatory and the Central Water Line, which goes from Observatory over to Three Bridge.

So we have implemented that operational procedure to try to maximize and retain as much water in South Rivanna Reservoir as possible, as long as possible.

The good news is the recent rains like yesterday, from Monday until today, the South Rivanna Reservoir rose about three inches.

So 0.23 feet, it went up on the water level.

So that's good news.

And it really puts us on par to where that reservoir was around July 15th.

So we sort of recovered 10 days

The drought, we convened the drought committee which includes representatives Lauren from the city and Quinn from the service authority and Lance and his representative from the county as well as our people and they met last week and talked about our drought triggers.

When might we go to the next stage which is warning and that creates some mandatory water conservation measures in the city.

and possibly the county through the service authority.

The county has to be enacted and the service authority implements it.

And we're talking about two to two and a half feet down is the level we're looking at for the South Rivanna Reservoir.

When it reaches that level, we would go to the next stage of a drought warning.

And then possibly five feet down would be emergency stage.

So again, we're monitoring all these factors and the drought committee is going to meet again Friday to review what's happening.

Because as I said, on one hand, it's getting worse.

The colors are changing on all the maps indicating the drought is worsening.

We feel good that South Savannah stabilized over the last 10 days and not continuing to decline.

It was going down about a tenth of a foot each day.

And so that's leveled off.

Well, we ran the model, which indicated that we did have greater than a 10% chance that South Rivanna would be below 70% full within 10 weeks.

And the model says South Rivanna will be.

So that's a concern.

I was going to give you some information.

We looked at the Mitchums River.

And as an example, on before the rain, Monday, we had about 6 million gallons coming down the Mitchums.

And then when it rained yesterday, last night, it was up to about 20 million gallons.

but this morning it already dropped back down to 12 million gallons.

So it's the rivers and the streams flash when we get a storm and come back down.

And hopefully we're catching a good part of that in our reservoirs but we need more than just a shower to bring us out of the drought-like conditions.

That's a factor we're aware of.

Yes, ma'am.

So we're trying to balance saving the water for the for the community as against the challenges that it creates when businesses have to cut back on the use of water.

Okay.

That was the good news I have for you.

So we did have some good news.

We got an additional grant from the

For flood protection, resiliency design and scoping project that we submitted almost $200,000.

That's from the federal FEMA through Virginia Department of Emergency Management.

And we applied for this grant.

So this is this is talking about climate changing climate conditions when we get the same amount of rain through a year, but we get fewer storms of higher intensity.

which creates more flooding that maybe you see on television from night to night.

And so this study is to say, okay, well, let's look at our facilities, particularly our wastewater facilities who are typically built low near the rivers and see if we need to make some accommodations to protect them against a rise in flood levels.

So this is a study that we applied for and we were happy to get the funds for that.

and Jennifer Whitaker, Ms. Whitaker, Director of Engineering and Maintenance, did give a presentation as part of our communication and collaboration outreach and she gave a presentation to the Avon Community Advisory Committee.

Thanks, Bill.

Any comments or questions for Bill?

Yeah, I know that you've said a lot of this already, but could you maybe just summarize and encapsulate.

We're in a tough spot right now in terms of the water that we have and the drought committee.

So what would those sort of deliberations look like and what are the kinds of possible outcomes?

So you have members of the media or they were here earlier.

What sort of things, and to Ms. Mallet's point, what sort of notification happens?

Okay, so the good news again is where our reservoirs and South Rivanna is 94% full.

So that's good news.

And Sugar Hollow looks nice.

We've got a nice picture we'll show you later today.

But if it's going to decline one or two tenths of a foot per day, it goes down pretty rapidly.

I don't know how many numbers, I can't quote you the number of days, but we're looking at a specific volume and a level

How many days supply do we have?

And watching how that goes down and trying to pick a good threshold where it would be appropriate to go to mandatory or mandatory restrictions and then emergency restrictions.

And the regional drought management plan gives guidance on that.

It says to look at all the factors that I just talked about.

What's the national forecast, the local, the streams,

the weather forecast, run your model, see what that tells you, assimilate all that data and come up with a recommendation.

And that's what we're doing as a group, as the committee.

And then when the committee says, yeah, we think two and a half feet is a good threshold to go to warning.

When we get close to two and a half feet and there's no rain in the forecast,

We're going to send a letter to the city and the county and say we've declared a drought warning and we recommend you implement your emergency ordinances.

And that's how it gets started.

And then Lauren and her department, I understand, would apply that and enforce it for the city and the service authority would implement its conservation measures for county public water users.

and I think both ordinances have fines in them for people who do not comply.

There may be a warning, but eventually it can be a fine.

Yeah, I'll add a little bit.

In 2017, we were able to exercise the plan that had been developed early in the 2000s.

So what we've done, coordinated with the Florence team of the city, we've developed a number of different advertisements, BSAs that are done, if you haven't yet,

Hose only, you don't get water at the restaurant unless you ask for it, and maybe some of the irrigation are allowed from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m., something like that.

So there are a number of measures in the county and the city ordinances that address the conservation.

Yes, sir.

Particularly because they're your customer.

And the process is once we receive the letter from Bill, then it has to go on a council agenda that you authorize it.

You set it, the council sets it.

Okay, thank you.

You may have said this and I missed it.

So 2B to two and a half B down from South Fork is a threshold and where are we then?

We're at 0.37 or 0.4 today.

We're at 0.34 feet down, a third of a foot down.

So that's 0.34 inches down.

And we're looking to be two to two and a half feet down.

When I drive over the bridge, I'm required to see the water coming.

That's two and a half days.

I don't think it was all the time.

It's definitely here a bit, as you said, where the rains happened.

On the wrong side of the building.

I know I made this argument a couple times, and I think that the restrictions were fairly short-winded because they were started early, and they were, and without even having less of an impact on this building, everybody could sort of do their part instead of everybody doing nothing, and then all of a sudden having to be in the classroom.

So that's always what I've been looking for,

Brad will step in and then call on people.

Much more strong.

And we did go into the drought watch stage that the board approved last month, really before the guidelines said we should.

But it was because the whole state was said to be in a drought watch.

So we followed along.

And now the state says our area is in a drought warning.

So those are the things the committee is going to need to look at is having to hit the good spot here

Okay.

We'll move on to items from the public.

Are there any members of the public here today who would like to speak?

OK, we'll close the items from the public and move on to the consent agenda.

Are there any items on the consent agenda?

Board members would like to call for comments or questions.

We have a motion to approve the consent agenda.

So moved.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Motion carries.

So we are going to go into a joint session with the Solid Waste Authority at this time.

So we want to open up the Solid Waste Authority.

OK.

We have a motion to reconvene.

Do we have a second?

Second.

Second.

All in favor on the solid waste?

Aye.

So I'm giving you our update for our strategic plan.

which obviously, you know, this is our second iteration of it in 2023.

This is our vision and mission, vision to serve the community as a recognized leader in environmental stewardship by providing exceptional water and salt waste services.

And our mission, our knowledgeable and professional team serves the Charlottesville, Albemarle, and UVA community by providing high quality water and wastewater treatment, refuse and recycling services in a financially responsible and sustainable manner.

These are our values, which we did.

This is a change from our first strategic plan.

We actually defined them.

So our first priority is communication and cloud ratio.

We got a few things going on.

We've had a lot of tours.

at our facilities, what you see up at the top there, Woodbrook Elementary School.

The first graders came to the Ivy Community Center and Transfer Station.

There was 96 of them.

So we had a small group of four, yes, quite a few.

They were terrific.

And you see the picture up on the top left.

They actually wrote us all letters afterwards.

I have a stack of letters in my office from them.

and then the picture next to it you see we are actually teaching them about recycling.

Also with solid waste we signed a contract earlier this year with WNRN and it's a non-profit listener supported independent radio network and what we're doing there for solid waste and this is specific to solid waste is really talking about here's the services that we offer, here's any special like HHW information and that sort of thing.

If you're listening, you might hear me do their station ID.

So that was kind of a cool thing.

We are redesigning our website.

Yay.

That's a happy thing.

So we chose Red Orange Studio to do that.

We are in the middle of the project.

So by the end of this year, what you will see is we have a main site of Rivanna.org and then two, I'll say child sites.

One is RivannaWater.org and the other is RivannaSolidWaste.org and they are specific to those authorities.

So I think it's going to be a really, really neat

thing by the time we're done with it.

Coming back around the bend there, the UVA public health class was touring Moores Creek, the treatment plant.

We didn't have the best day, but it was still good.

So you see Rob Hack there actually talking with those folks.

They actually come every single year.

We were already on Facebook.

We are now, you heard Jenny say, on Instagram as well.

So please feel free to go and like us.

And then that last picture, you see Bethany over at Riverfest, which we are at every year as well.

So we've been pretty busy around the public outreach and that sort of thing.

We are excited because we will be adding an outreach coordinator at the tail end of this year.

So I think that's gonna only help us expand that.

Next slide.

Environmental Stewardship, I took a picture actually with when the first graders were there over at the NOMO section at Ivy, which is not the NUC anymore.

But Jerry, is Jerry still here?

No, Jerry left.

So Jerry actually in another life was one of those people who planted wildflowers for people's fields and all that.

If you actually go out to Ivy, you can kind of see it in that picture, but there's all wildflowers and everything.

So we've got pollinators coming there as part of our, so what you see out here is actually taken to the next level over there.

We've had a lot of folks, I believe that's a picture of Jennifer volunteering with the Rivanna Conservation Alliance.

Leah did it, Dave Tungate did it as well, teaching kids about the environment, strength, health, and that sort of thing.

We also have the kids from St. Anne's, Bellfield, the 10th grade class cleaning up the Moores Creek wetlands.

So that is out front here.

We pulled the tubes off the trees and everything.

It's quite actually an interesting little space up front there that you don't get to see very often.

And then the last thing I've got on here, that is a picture from the drone of our clean fill area at Ivy and a little math done by Phil.

It prevents over 780 metric tons of CO2 from being discharged into the environment because it reduces the distance that trucks have to travel to actually get rid of clean fill.

So a benefit that maybe isn't necessarily thought about or spoken about too often.

Workforce Development, I have to talk about the picture right in the middle there with David Rhoades.

David just graduated with his bachelor's in environmental science from Southern New Hampshire University.

And that was our tuition reimbursement program that got him through that.

He will start in January his master's program.

We are using Barron Ridge Consulting for individual leadership coaching for all of our new and current leaders with Tim Smith is his name.

Tim has actually developed a Rivanna specific program

which is really kind of neat.

It really speaks to our values and that sort of thing.

We continue to do updates to our existing job descriptions.

That is a goal, 20% a year.

And obviously the creation of move down descriptions as we add new positions as well.

We just had two water and sewer mechanics attend the class A CDL class at PVCC and PASS and they have their class A CDLs and we have a solid waste employee who is doing the same thing now.

The reason that we use PVCC for that, we used to teach our own and a law was passed, a federal law, I believe that actually now forces us to go through a, I guess, accredited teacher.

And so the beauty of PVCC is that it's right there and we can use them.

And then the other thing, another goal that we had for the workforce development team was to really expand

Candidate Sourcing and Diverse Candidate Sourcing.

So what we did, we got our paychecks payroll system, which is also a hiring, recruiting application system.

And so that list that you see there is where they automatically post now.

So get rid of everything, but indeed, because that's in our website and that's where we were before.

So we've moved really quick to increase that.

And then in some cases with water and soil, we also post to the American Water Works Association, which is well.

Optimization and resiliency.

Right out here at Moores Creek, we optimize the caustic feed into the wastewater aeration basins.

It has actually saved us $173,000, which is a crazy amount.

Safety, our safety program falls under this.

Oh, thank you.

So a couple things going on with safety that I think are kind of a big deal.

We did do arc flash training for 38 employees.

We also never had an electrical safety chapter.

And George, our safety manager, reached out to his counterpart at UVA and got their electrical safety chapter.

and went through and now we have, it will be part of our safety manuals of August 1st.

We have an electrical safety chapter.

So I'm pretty excited about that for a couple of reasons.

One, here we go, thank you.

One, because we actually have the chapter now, which I think is a great thing.

And two, because we got it because he partnered with another organization in the area to get it.

And so I think that's just a really great story around reaching out to your peers

Up at the top here, for the life of me, I forget what that is, but we are standardizing equipment that we're using in our plants.

So we're using the same things throughout different plants so that when you're training operators to operate a different plant, they're now using the same equipment versus using equipment that maybe they've never used before, which makes training obviously much easier.

And the last thing, I don't have the dollar savings on this, but it's $20,000 a year.

This is the alum feed system that was specifically designed for South Rivanna and it determines the feed, determines and feeds the correct amount necessary for the treatment conditions over at South Rivanna.

So about $20,000 in duration with that stimulus.

Next slide.

Planning and Infrastructure.

So one of the things that we're challenged with here is to have cost efficient project planning.

And so that first picture you see is actually a report back from the value engineering sessions on this building.

But having personally sat in on these, this is actually very interesting and fascinating stuff that you come up with.

And we actually talk about how do we make building more efficient, how to potentially save money.

And I'm not gonna sit here and tell you every idea we come up with saves money, but it really gives you a good look at

where you can say things and where you can become more efficient.

And I think the thing that was most interesting about it was you've had a lot of different voices who are experts in a lot of different fields chiming in here.

So it's not just our folks trying to come up with stuff, it's other people coming in as well.

Two top pictures that you see, our maintenance team is using CityWorks to document preventive maintenance on our equipment and to maintain and put in our records.

Specifically the picture on the left, I believe that's Josh and Tyrone, they're actually using iPads now at our equipment to actually put information into CityWorks.

to keep our records, our maintenance records updated.

And finally for doc link, our SOP, our document storage has increased so far by 4.7% in 2024.

The goal is five a year, 5% a year.

And this is pretty important because it makes our information much more accessible, easier to find because it's actually categorized and it helps us with quicker decisions.

I'll call this a reasonably big change.

Bill already spoke about this and I actually think Leah going next to talk about it too, but our turnover goal for the Solid Waste Authority is 10%.

We are at 22.6 this year.

We had six employees leave between July 1st of 2023 and June 30th of 2024.

out of 24 employees, so it depends on 22.6.

Our new number of employees is now 28.

So basically if three people leave this year, we will be over that 10% goal.

Our goal is always to set realistic, transparent, and achievable goals, but challenging goals.

And our concern has been that 10% is truthfully very unrealistic, basically,

in an environment where you have a lot of unskilled labor and you have to keep three people as your number and that's it.

So what the flip is, we didn't wanna go up to 20%.

So yeah, just let them go.

We wanna make sure that our folks are engaged and interested in working here and that we're taking care of them.

So we wanted to make sure that we were challenging but realistic.

So that is why

We are changing the solid waste turnover goal of 15%.

I think that's it.

Yes, now it's always none of those are retirees.

In Water and Soar, we had a 14% turnover goal.

Each person in Water and Soar equals 1%.

Three of those people are retirees, but they're leaving.

The difference is, it's a very good question.

The difference is they're leaving because they're done their career, they've done their thing.

They're not leaving because they found something better.

in their minds.

But we still have to fill them.

Entire, leave us, we leave them, whatever.

Thank you, Betsy.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

So I'm Leah Beard.

I am really excited to tell you about some cool things that our employees are doing and our organization.

So I've been here since January.

And in that time, I have felt really honored to become a part of this organization because there is some really cool things going on.

So I'm grateful that I can share kind of the work that we do

in the organization with y'all.

Oh, did you click two?

I'm sorry.

Oh, no.

So kind of to what Betsy and Bill were talking about with our turnover rates, one of the things that we are really hoping to do that we can help employees see their total rewards package and that includes our benefits.

So I've been doing a lot of kind of one on one

Sessions with employees.

So when we have in our solid waste department, sometimes people will get offered another job making 50 cents more an hour.

And that's all they see is that extra dollar, extra 50 cents an hour.

And so kind of really telling them about all our cool benefits that we have.

One of the real big things that I think is extraordinary about Rivanna.

So our health insurance company raised our rates by 30% at this renewal.

and our executive director and you all as the board have made it important.

And that is a big decision to not pass that increase on for employees.

So that is a benefit that sometimes, you know, an employee who gets offered 50 cents more an hour somewhere else doesn't really realize that their health insurance rates are staying the same and have stayed the same before.

I think the past seven years, that's huge.

And so that is something that I really want to kind of help our employees see is all those benefits that we have.

So we started online enrollment.

So our open enrollment this past May took place online through paychecks.

We reevaluated our dental and vision because we were getting a lot of feedback from our employees that the network

was not very good for our dental coverage.

So we've had one company and I guess a lot of local dentists had stopped working with them.

So we switched over to another companies.

We're hoping that will increase kind of those benefits for our employees.

Elisa Cooper, who's our payroll and benefits administrator has just been instrumental in making this process easy for our employees.

Our open enrollment process was really,

Streamlined and made easy for our employees.

So she really did a lot of good things for that.

Posted a lot of in-person sessions where I really was trying to teach employees about their benefits.

I'm also starting to do that with our new employees.

So sitting down one on one with our new employees to say, hey, here's our benefits.

Here's the difference between high deductible and low deductible.

You know, just to try and walk them through that.

and then we also do some retirement sessions.

So we do some early retirement through the state of Virginia.

We are on the VRS system and I'm just trying to reach out and offer different opportunities for our employees that we did a session with Aflac where we talked about like supplemental health benefits for our people that are considering retirement.

So just some different opportunities that we have.

So really our managers and our supervisors at this organization are engaging their employees to grow and stretch and learn more things.

So that's really kind of what I'm passionate about is focusing on like that internal development.

So we have had 15 internal promotions since I've been here in January.

And that's not me, that's our managers and

and our supervisors really working with their employees to make sure that they are getting to where they want to be.

We have also had 14 new hires.

We are kind of starting to do a baseline on our diversity, kind of reviewing all of those kind of policies.

So right now we have about 18%

by racial people of color, and two out of five of our executive leadership team is female.

So that is something that we're just kind of getting a baseline now so that we can hopefully grow and improve our rates when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

And for our recruiting, we have created an online job portal.

Betsy spoke about it.

We're posting to eight different external sites right now, really trying to promote the good things about our organization that we offer.

And so the other thing that I have kind of started doing is doing in-person interviews on sites at the locations where the individual will be working.

So instead of hosting interviews here in this conference room at our administration building, I've been going out to the water plant

having interviews at the water plan or at the solid waste facility.

Kind of moving on more with workforce development, a lot of this is repeating what Betsy already told you with our strategic plan, but we really are supporting organizational growth and development.

That's really something that we are focused on here.

So that includes our five-year staffing plan, increasing, adding positions,

We do tuition reimbursement for our employees and then evaluating our turnover rates, looking for ways that we can retain those employees in other ways.

So that would be like that whole package.

And then our employee growth and development.

This really speaks again to our internal processes of investing in our employees.

We want to think about our employees as an investment, not a liability on our budget sheet.

So we have paid bonuses to some of those individuals in our maintenance department that have gone on outside of work and gotten extra certifications and certain skills that they had an interest in.

And so that's something that's really important.

We have developed some specific training for our wastewater and water employees.

And that was something that kind of helped them with their continuing education.

There is bespoke leadership training that we have offered to recently promoted supervisors and managers.

We offer training available on our phones now on our mobile devices through paychecks.

So those individuals that aren't sitting in front of a desktop can have access to it.

And LinkedIn Learning is something that we've added too.

So that's something that has been free for all of our employees.

So next slide.

And this is just a little bit more about our community partnerships.

So we have hosted some sessions with our local community partners.

Star Hill Pathways came from UVA.

We've worked with them the last couple of years to give them a tour of one of our water plants.

And then they go on to Peter Creek to kind of see both sides of that.

Local elementary, middle, and high schools.

We are working with the local Rivanna watershed organizations like Rivanna Conservation Alliance, Rivanna Stormwater Education Partnership, I think is what it is.

And we have our awesome interns this summer.

And so one of the things that I also reached out to an individual who is new to the Career Center at UVA

She is kind of a liaison between the Career Center at UVA and the Virginia Talent and Opportunity Partnership, so VTOP.

We want to start opening up more internships, job shadowing, mentoring, those types of skill programs to the local community.

That's really all I have, so thanks for giving me a couple minutes to brag about the organization and our employees and our awesome

Managers, Supervisors, everybody.

I would say it's more of the managers and supervisors that are doing that work.

Great.

Thanks, Leah.

Thanks.

Very interesting.

He is doing a great job for us as our HR manager.

Okay.

And someone read us into closed session.

Okay, I move that the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority enter into a joint closed session with the Rivanna-Walter and Sewer Authority to discuss confidential information related to cybersecurity and the security of the Authority's fiscal premises as permitted by the Public Safety Exemptions at Section 2.3-3711A19 of the Code of Virginia,

and confidential performance evaluations, goals and objectives.

OK, so we have a motion and a second.

Solid waste.

Janet?

Yes.

Scott Stewart?

Yes, I read it for the Water and Sewer Authority, and I read it for the Joint Post-Session of the Department of Water and Sewer Authority, to discuss confidential information related to static security and security concerns with the Department of Water and Sewer Authority, to discuss confidential information related to static security and security concerns with the Department of Water and Sewer Authority, to discuss confidential information related to static security concerns with the Department of Water and Sewer Authority, to discuss confidential information related to static security concerns with the Department of Water and Sewer Authority,

We have a motion, and do we have a second?

Second.

Beth Lunsford?

Yes.

Ann Mallek?

Yes.

Richard Sint?

Yes.

Steven Sanders?

OK.

Rivanna, Water and Sewer Authority hereby certifies by an important vote that, to the best of each member's knowledge, owning public business matters lawfully exempt from the opening of the clients of the Virginia Bay Area, which Scaffey had identified in the motion authorizing the closed

Yes.

Okay, and the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority hereby certifies by recorded vote that as it rests with each member's knowledge, holding public business matters law to be exempted from the open meeting and the plannings of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion authorizing a closed meeting for her to discuss or consider in the closed meeting to which this certification was advised.

Second.

I second.

Yes.

Jim Andrews.

Yes.

Brian Pinkston?

Yes.

Jennifer, anything?

Yes.

Sam Sanders?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay, we are back in session.

And we need a motion to approve an increase in bill salary to recognize outstanding performance

and where the other staff who has achieved outstanding performance has received a merit increase of 3%, we would like to increase bills by 3%.

So we have a motion and a second.

I guess we have to do this in solid waste.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Okay.

Second.

And a second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Motion passes.

Do we have a motion and a second to adjourn?

So moved.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.