Draft Board Meeting Minutes – March 23, 2024

Call to Order:

Welcome: April, President

Present/Quorum: Dave (Manager), Paul, April, Todd, Clint, Susan

Approve – Contents and order of this Agenda: Approved.

Approve – Minutes of February meeting: Approved

Guest Speakers comments (if any): None

Board Member comments (if any): None

Dave and Skyler did great finding the massive leak, Paul threw a hand in looking for the leak, Susan and Sam reached out to local organiztions and Voice of Vashon reported on it.
Beachcomber is looking to do an article on the leak, will reach out to April and Dave
This was a good exercise in disaster planning and showed what are capabilities are in an emergency
Proposed conservation easement, annual report, candidates for next board

The Main Break:
Tuesday: Skyler knew from checking the silos that we were losing lots of water, ~240,000 gallons
Spent all day driving and walking to find the leak, expecting it to be easier to find
Looked at part time residents meters, no change there
Dave and Skylar went to the Sandy Shores filtration plant to manually turn it on and ensured the springs pumps were still going strong
Dave posted on the website and alerted the community of the emergency situation
We gained zero ground because the siloes were still draining as fast as they could fill it.
Wednesday: Skylar read the booster pump station hours, pump 3 had run 23 hours which let them know the problem was in the south end of the system.
Dave was able to hear the water continuing to rush after turning off a valve, the leak was 6 feet away from the valve. 300k-400k gallons were lost in sandy field.
The valves had a T in the line and the valve was off of that T and was intended for a fire hydrant that was never installed. Also, someone put a 2 inch line that feeds one house.
400k gallons is the conservative estimate, could be closer to 450k or 500k.
Paul asked if there is a flow-meter we can install at the silos to alert us that flow has increased. We can add that to our CIP plan.
The culprit was a flowering maple that had grown on top of the line and the root ball had destroyed the line.

Billing system upgrade could be $6k, not $10k. Training might be more onerous than previously considered. There’s a 3-4 month lag on implementation. Angie, Skyler and Dave have viewed a demo and learning curve shouldn’t be an issue.
There’s a potential savings of $4k saved converting to online billing. This is paper, ink, postage, envelopes, maintenance fees.
2024-2025 budget – Usage has gone down some from 2023, Insurance has gone up by a large margin, rates are still under discussion for 2024/2025

Dave and Paul met with the county, CIP will continue as-is. Start engineering in 2024 99th to Point Piner
We got an estimate from Vashon Custom Homes to replace the skirting on the DWA building.
PRV project – if we have a dry summer, we will be able to get the project done. We have to put it out for bid.
268th property – April and Dave met with the parks dept. They would like to buy a conservation easement, they would then sell the residential building rights and would restrict ever building on that parcel
We can carve out a section for ourselves, so if we get a water right for it, we can drill a well.
Tom with the land trust is volunteering to help king county buy the easement. Appraisal and proposal will take at least 4 months, then DWA would need to go out to members which could take 2-3 months

Annual Meeting notice, President’s Message and Agenda will go out in the next bill.

2 Comments

Comments are closed.