Okay, welcome everyone. My name is Lee Stafle. I'm the communications manager for the city of Rosemount. I want to welcome you all here tonight. Thank you for coming. We appreciate everybody taking the time out of on a a beautiful summer day to come and talk to us about water. We know there's a lot going on and we want to be here to listen to you to help give you access to all of our partners in water quality. Um, clean water is a resource that we all value. We know as motans we value that as people who live in Rosemont and the surrounding areas. We really value this. It's an important resource for all of us. Not only does our do our city employees work manage miles of pipes, water towers, um pumps, hydrants, we also live and work here. We spend much of our waking hours here. We drink the water same as you. We have many city employees who live in town. And so this I just wanted to level set that and and remind you that this truly is important to all of us. We've released a lot of information on water recently. So I'm sure many of you have seen the water quality report. We put that out every year in the city newsletter online. Um, but also a lot of people got the gross alpha letter. Please just raise your hand if you received the gross alpha letter in the mail. Okay, mostly everybody did. Great. Um, I know that that's the one of the main reasons why we're all here tonight and so I just wanted to point that out. Um, we've also been putting out a series of newsletter articles. We have um a requirement now with the gross alpha issue to put out a quarterly update on that and that will always be found in the city newsletter. So make sure you actually open up that newsletter and find the information there. And then we also beefed up our water quality page so that not only can you find the history of water quality reports there for the last about five years and then we also added tabs for some of the different issues that we're seeing, the different concerns that people have. So you have one page that you can go to to get all the information and find out who our partners are, how to get a hold of of them, um how to how to reach us. So those are some things that you're seeing and I know that that's brought up a lot of questions, a lot of concerns and we want to that's why we're here tonight so that we can help introduce you to the many partners that we have in water quality. This isn't just the city that's working on this. We have lots of partners and each of them have a different area of expertise and so that's why we want we wanted to first start this meeting by introducing all of our partners letting them talk a little bit about their area of expertise so that you can understand what their piece of the pie is and then how we all work together to ensure that we have clean safe water for everyone. Um the other thing that I wanted to let you know is what to expect tonight. You know we had the open tableing. We're going to do the presentation. Each person is going to come up and and tell you a little bit about what they do and what their um agency does and then after that we'll have a few of the questions that were offered online last night or in the last couple of days. So, thank you for those who submitted questions. We're going to try and highlight the ones that we haven't already heard that aren't already on our website. So, if you haven't visited that water quality page on on our website, I encourage you to do that. We have a lot of the FAQs that have been coming in over the last couple of months that are listed there and question and answers are listed there. We're going to try and pull out some that we haven't already seen or heard and talk about those and then after that we'll go back to the open tableing to see if you have additional questions. You can talk to each of us based on what area of concern that you have. So, first I want to introduce my colleague Nick Edgar. He's the public works director for Rosemount. Nick has 30 years of experience in m municipal government in a variety of roles and he's served the city of Rosemont as the public works director since 2021. Prior to Rosemount, he served the city of Hastings for 19 years. He was assistant city engineer, city engineer, and public works director there. He has a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota. He has leadership certificates from Hamlin University and he's been a professional engine a licensed professional engineer in the state of Minnesota since 2007. He's also served in various capacities at the Minnesota chapter of American Public Works Association, including the role of president in 2022. So, welcome Nick. Thank you, Lee. Good evening, everyone. Hopefully this is uh loud enough. I I wanted to spend just a few minutes on the front end uh highlighting a little bit of information about the city's water system and what we have here. Again, I lead the public works team for the city and we're responsible for all the infrastructure in town, the maintenance and uh many other facets, but most importantly water supply and conveyance. So, uh, just a few facts about our system and these were boards that are out in the hallway as you entered the steeple center tonight. But to reiterate, the city sources its drinking water from the Jordan aquifer, which is underground, several hundred feet. We have uh, nine wells right now that u are on our system. Eight are currently in service, but we are in the process of getting ready to turn on a brand new well, well number 17, uh, which we expect to be able to activate in the next month or so. Uh, water from this system is distributed through about 166 miles of pipe underground, under the streets, under green spaces, and so forth. Uh, and we have multiple I I really gota I can shout a little more too if we have to. Um, sorry, where was I? We We have 166 miles of pipe currently. And of course, as you all know, the city is growing, so we're adding to this every single year. The mileage is building up. Uh we have several water towers that uh are spaced throughout town um uh for storage and uh to meet our water demands. It's a connected system. And by that uh what I want to just bring to everyone's attention is that water from any one of the operating wells can travel through the entire system to the other end. it it's you no one well serves just an exclusive set of properties or an exclusive home in the city. It's all interconnected. We cycle the wells to balance wear and tear on them and uh to meet the demands that we have throughout the year and seasonally. Um the city does publish a annual water quality report. Lee touched on that. You can find that on our website. Typically, it comes out in April of each year. So, we just issued our most recent one very, uh, not a long time ago. Here, uh, that can be found on our water quality web page. Here's a snapshot of what that looks like, and I'll leave this up for a little bit. There's a QR code here you can scan with your phone to get a direct link to that. But you'll find again those annual water quality reports, the listing of different ongoing issues that we have with respect to gross alpha, the action steps that we've taken to date. It's all highlighted there. You can see the green um tab uh in the middle of the page is is the portion about the gross alpha matter and this is going to be the central landing point and continuously updated uh location for this ongoing issue and many others. So I really encourage you to take a visit and see that info that's there if you haven't already and just uh follow along with it through time. Um, this chart's in the back of the room near our table. And what we really wanted to emphasize here is that as was mentioned, protecting drinking water quality is a joint effort and it takes a lot of different entities, people, professions to do that. And and uh what this does is lists out kind of the primary functions of what our role as the city is. And that's to obviously operate the system that we have, maintain it, implement solutions when we need to, and of course to communicate with all of you. And we do that regularly every day. On the state and federal agency side, there are regulators and our partners as well. They issue permits that allow us to operate the public water system that we have. They set the standards and uh the the rules that we need to abide by as a public water supplier. They provide the regulatory oversight and perform testing uh for us and and there's a feedback loop to the city so that we know how we're performing and what things we need to respond and react to and they also assist and require the annual reporting that we do. So the the water quality report that I mentioned earlier is it originates from a template document that the department of health sets up and uh sources all of the testing data from uh throughout the the preceding year and and generates that report which we then end up publishing. So obviously in the middle this is all in an effort to ensure a safe drinking water supply. Uh so with that the first speaker that I'm going to bring up is Mr. Sam Swanson uh from the department of health. Sam is a compliance engineer and he has worked with the department of health for about two and a half years where he has specialized in statewide compliance for arsenic POS and radionucleides. Sam holds a bachelor's degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Sam Good evening everyone. Uh, how's the sound in back? Can everyone hear me? >> Is this better? Perfect. My name is Sam. Uh, I'm here today representing the Department of Health, the drinking water protection program, and I'm going to talk about the regulation of public water supplies and gross alpha. So, what is the role of the Department of Health? What is the mission of drinking water protection? It's all about protecting public health as it relates to drinking water in Minnesota. So, to accomplish that mission, we do a lot of different things, but the most important one is this first bullet point on the slide. We implement the Safe Drinking Water Act. Uh, that's a set of federal standards and laws that I'll discuss in later slides. Um, but as you can see, we do quite a bit. Tonight we have various state agencies here. Um I'm from the Department of Health. So we look at the water that's coming up through a well out through pipes into your tap. We want to assess the quality of it and make sure it's safe to drink. We also have the pollution control agency here. They look at chemical releases and industrial pollutants. And finally, we have the Department of Natural Resources. They look at the water supply, the availability, essentially how much water is coming up from an aquifer. So, the Safe Drinking Water Act uh does a number of things. Um but first off, the Department of Health has privacy, which means the EPA has given us the authority to implement and enforce these federal rules. Um perhaps most importantly for these set of laws is uh this drinking water standards, the maximum contaminant levels or MCL's. Um, additionally there are sanitary surveys which are just regular inspections of public water suppliers. We do sample collection and we offer technical assistance, training and education to water systems, water operators, the general public. Um, and of course we regulate the water systems. And you can see there's a list of the contaminants that we regulate. Um, some of those are categories of contaminants, others are individual ones. Uh, but there's quite a bit. Uh we there's more than 90 contaminants that are regulated and again there are maximum contaminant levels set for each one. The EPA does a thorough costbenefit analysis for these standards. So they look at the economic impact of having to actually treat and take out contaminants from the water. They look at the the public health effects of where they set the level and they do other considerations as well. The testing frequency is also unique for each contaminant. Um, as a general rule of thumb, uh, these are based on testing results. And as testing results get closer and closer to the max level, they're tested for more frequently. We want to keep an eye on contaminants and track them better as they get higher. And then one point for tonight, um, the radionucleide rule, which governs gross alpha, has existed in its current iteration since 2004. So this violation that occurred, it wasn't because the regulations changed. It was because the groundwater conditions changed. So what is gross alpha? Well, alpha radiation is a type of ionizing radiation and gross means total. So it's just looking at the total amount of alpha radiation coming from a sample of water. It's measured in pico curies per liter. Uh pico means very very small. It's 10^ the 12th. uh curies is a unit of radiation and per liter is for a liter of water. So the when you look at the result it's telling you how much very small amount of radiation is in that given sample of water. Um so where does it come from? It comes from natural erosion and minerals in the aquifer. Uh you can see on the map it's a map of combined radium but it's combined radium and gross alpha are very closely closely correlated. uh where you find one, you're going to find the other. And you can see it's sort of this central eastern, southeastern part of Minnesota where you do find these contaminants. Um it's considered a chronic contaminant, which means you're not there's no expected health risks until you have decades of exposure at or over the limit. Um and so because it's a chronic contaminant, we evaluate compliance with the law based on a running annual average. We take a year's worth of data and we average it uh to determine whether or not it's above or below the limit. And something that's really important for the discussion tonight is that gross alpha levels increased all across southern and central Minnesota last year. This is not the only community that's dealing with a gross alpha violation. Uh the aquafer conditions did change last year. So specifically talking about Rosemount at the beginning of this year a violation was issued. We had the four quarters of data and the average came out to be 16 which was higher than the limit of 15. Um so we issued the the violation as is required by the safe drinking water act and then Rosemount issued that that first public notice within 30 days as they were required to and there will be an ongoing quarterly public notice requirement until the violation is resolved. Uh so expect to see more of those. Uh Rosemount also submitted their plan of action as required. Uh the city engineer is coming up after me to discuss uh what the plan details so I won't go too much into that. Um but MDH reviewed the plan. We found it to be satisfactory and we formalized it into a signed agreement between the city and the state. Uh so these are the steps to handle a violation as laid out by the safe drinking water act and Rosemounts followed every step. And before I end my presentation tonight, I want to give you the opportunity to look at these links, these QR codes. Um, the most important one would be the consumer confidence report. Uh, again, that's that annual report that goes out detailing your water quality. If you don't have time to see this, uh, or grab this on the screen, uh, we will have these QR codes available at uh, the MDH booth at the back of the room. And that's my time. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. Next up, I'm going to bring uh Chris Larson here. He is with the firm of Short Elliot Hendrickson, and they are the firm that the city has uh contracted with to explore the various solutions that we are evaluating for what we do next in terms of addressing gross alpha. And I'll just provide a bit of a intro on on Chris's resume here. Chris has served as an environmental engineer with short Elliot Hendrickson uh for more than 31 years planning, designing, and implementing municipal water supply and treatment projects throughout the Midwest. He holds a bachelor of science degree in environmental engineering from Michigan Technological University and a master of science degree in environmental engineering from the University of Minnesota. Over the course of his career, Chris has led the design of more than 15 drinking water treatment facilities and has extensive experience addressing radionucleide compliance issues, including gross alpha, radium, iron, manganesees, and other groundwater contaminants. His project experience includes the planning and design of a radium removal treatment facility for the communities of Savage, Spring Lake Park, Madina, Hinckley, and Malaca. Chris also has conducted specialized investigations of radionucleide occurrence in groundwater systems including evaluating the composition of gross alpha activity associated with an aquifer storage and recovery well. Chris thank you Nick and good evening everyone. Uh as Nick mentioned, I'm here to talk about some of the engineering solutions that have been evaluated uh to remove or or reduce the gross alpha in Rose Mountain's drinking water. So some of the options that we have evaluated to reduce uh gross alpha and radium and and the reason I combine radium with gross alpha is that radium is one of the compounds that makes up gross alpha. So radium is a contributor to gross alpha. Uh the first thing that we looked at was minimizing use or converting well 8 to emergency use only. Uh part of the problem with that is that like you're a growing community and you need the water. Uh Nick mentioned that well 17 is coming online. If you quit using well 8, you'll need well 18 also. Um another thing that we looked at was blending well eight and well 9. Well 9 is reasonably close to well 8 and you could pipe the water from well 8 to well 9, build some a little mixing system and then put the water back into the distribution system and that would lower the gross alpha and radium concentrations. We also uh looked at treatment to lower gross alpha. Uh we evaluated a treatment plant at well 8. Uh we also looked at a treatment plant at well 12. Now, well 12's a little bit further away, but this would allow you to connect a handful of wells to a new treatment facility. We'd be looking at connecting wells 7, 8, 9, and 12. Uh, part of this is that it requires several miles of new trunk water mane on more extensive infrastructure and construction of a water treatment plant of that capacity would also take likely take two years to construct. Uh this is a gross alpha solutions matrix. Uh this is actually can be found on Rosemount's well or website and there's a QR code here and there's a sheet in the back that you can pick up one of these to get the QR code. Uh so this just goes through the different solutions uh that that I've basically already mentioned, but it but it also identifies the the rough cost of those solutions. And some of the notes include like timelines and and some of the difficulties or advantages or disadvantages of the of the respective solutions. So I mentioned blending well 8 and well 9 was one of the options that we were reviewing. Uh this just shows you sort of the proximity proximity of well 8 to well 9. It's about 2,000 ft away. So a little less than a half a mile of new water man would be required uh in the street. And then I mentioned some mixing piping inside the well 9 wellhouse. Uh this is a a a figure that shows the water man or potential water main routes for a treatment plant That way. Uh and and one of the issues to point out is that Nick mentioned that the city has eight active wells. Uh looking to have a ninth. Uh this would only treat four of them. So you'd still have five wells that uh did not have treatment. >> Thank you, Chris. And I I did want to touch on just a couple of things before we bring Valerie up here um that that may have left out there at the beginning with with respect to uh one of the options at the the front end minimizing the use of well number eight. We're already doing that in a way where uh the city's uh operational matrix if you will of when a well turns on to provide water into the system to meet demand. There's an order to this and we're able to make adjustments to when different wells turn on or when their trigger points are. And so with respect to well number eight, it is now currently the last one to turn on to meet uh daily supply needs. And so this is only happening uh typically at this time of year when we're having uh warmer weather and there's more in the way of irrigating going on. We also might see it trip on if there were a larger structure fire. Uh so there is that was an easy measure to take right off the bat and I just wanted to emphasize that we're already doing that. Um the other thing that I'll note and and this is goes back to that that matrix that was identified. There is a copy of that on all your chairs. I think you've probably discovered that at this point. But again that's posted on our website. So, next up, I'm going to ask Valerie Nep with uh Dakota County Groundwater Protection Unit to join us here. Uh Valerie will explain the role that the county has in protecting drinking water supplies and in particular those of private well owners. Uh Valerie has a master's degree and a professional engineering license in environmental engineering and has worked with government agencies for over 20 years managing environmental health and protection projects. She's been with the Dakota County uh groundwater unit since 2018 as the uh groundwater protection unit supervisor where she's responsible for leading development and implementation of the county's groundwater plan as well as other strategic groundwater and drinking water protection efforts. Valerie also serves on the Metropolitan Area Water Supply Advisory Committee or Mossac. Valerie, >> be careful of the microphone. That's being a little funny. >> All right. Thank you so much. Let's see if we can get this to work. I'm a little shorter than everybody else, I think, on here. Um, so I'm Valerie Nupel. I'm with the Dakota County Groundwater Protection Unit with the Environmental Resource Department. Just here to talk about the role of the county as it relates to drinking water. And so when it comes to municipal systems, the county we don't have a role when it comes to regulating testing or treatment of municipal systems. So Sam really covered that. It's really a Department of Health that is the regulatory authority to ensure public water suppliers meet that safe drinking water standard. Um but we do regulate well construction and sealing for private wells and we spend a lot of our time assisting private well owners. So just a quick survey. I know we have at least one person. Anybody out there on a private? Well, okay, we got at least one person. That's okay. So, I'm just going to touch this real quick. Um, so again, if you see that figure, if you're on a municipal system, doesn't really apply to you. Um, municipal systems are routinely monitored and tested as Sam pointed out, but private well owners, they're not regulated by federal drinking water standards and really they're responsible for their own testing and treatment. Um, and the only time it's required to test is at the time that the well is constructed or at the time of point of sale here in Dakota County. So, Department of Health does recommend if you're on a private well that you test for these five common contaminants. So, that's for private well users and then that you test for at least nitrate and caulifform bacteria annually. So, if you're on a private well and you want to learn about private well testing, please see me at the table. I'm happy to talk through options and testing available through the county. Um the county has also conducted some of the most robust um groundwater sampling I think throughout the entire state. We have a lot of resources. We had a 20-year ambient study, some really great staff that have put a lot of work into doing a lot of private well sampling as well as environmental well sampling as well. Um we provide that data to the city as well as the state agencies and this really kind of helps with water supply planning as well as well protection. So, some of the resources that we've provided, um, these are available on our website. So, you can go to the Dakota County website. You can search wells and drinking water. We have several studies that are posted there as well as some resources if you're interested in learning just about some of the general groundwater conditions um through testing some of these private wells. Uh, we have a website that specifically talks about PAS data that's been collected throughout Dakota County. Again, these are private wells and environmental wells. In fact, we have a dashboard that was just published earlier today that you can go interact with and see some of that data. We have a website with informations on radionucleides which includes some information on radium as well as gross alpha. The picture that you see there on the left, this is some gross alpha testing that we did for private wells. Um, and that is available um on that website. And then we have a water quality story map if you're inter interested in interacting with that. Um, it has a lot of different features to it. You can look at some of the geology background when it comes to Dakota County as well as a lot of the testing that we've done including nitrates, maganesees, um I think arsenic as well as well and some other pollutants that we've tested for throughout the last 20 plus years. So feel free to jump on that QR code and check out some of the water quality story map. And then we've also just kind of been keeping an eye on some of the water levels. I know there's been a lot of questions um lately um especially because we had a three-year drought starting in 2021. What are the groundwater levels here in Dakota County? So, I just want to touch on that briefly here today. Um water levels are monitored by the Department of Natural Resources. They have a a large observation network and then Met Council has done some groundwater modeling. The map that you see there on the left, this was a projected 2040 water level changes. This was modeled by the Metropolitan Council when they did their 2015 water supply plan. They just updated that water supply plan. They're actually in the process of updating this model since it's about a decade um old now. So, it be really interesting to see some of those the the updates. Um those areas that are darker to red, those are areas that are projected to have more draw down. Um a lot of these are some of our larger cities. And then we also have a lot of large a irrigation which is what you see some of that draw down in the southeastern part of the county. Um but on the right side uh that you see there this is our groundwater trends from our department of natural resources observation network. Um this is throughout the state. I did try to pull out just Dakota County. So what you see in that little square there that is kind of the Dakota County area. And I think the important part to show here is that this is 20 years of data 20 2005 to 2024. And what you're seeing is that we've had some record rainfalls over the last couple decades. And what this has resulted in is that our county's groundwater levels are actually stable or they're also increasing. So if we look at our water levels today versus where they were 20 years ago, our actual water levels are higher than where they were 20 years ago. So, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you, Valerie. Uh, next up, we'll have Chris Gossinac with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency uh tell us a little bit about their role in groundwater protection and pollution prevention. But before we get into that, one of the main purposes or impetus for uh us inviting the MPCA here is you noted earlier that we are operating eight of our nine wells. So what's the story with the ninth one? That is well number seven. That one has been put on emergency backup status for about a year now because we did have a POS detection there. And although uh we're not quite yet at the enforcable stage of PAS from the federal government, obviously things are trending that way and we did that action voluntarily and proactively uh to remove that wells contribution from the mix. So far, we're able to still meet supply uh demands out there as as we use the system, but we know that with growth in the city, that can't continue indefinitely. Uh so uh one of the questions that we have is what what gets looked at when you have this sort of uh incident occur? what type of investigation might there be and what could the outcomes be of such an investigation? Chris's group works on a lot of those things and so he's going to explain a little bit about that as well as other aspects of MPCA's role. So, I'll give an intro for Chris. Chris Gosnak is a supervisor in MPCA's remediation division working within the super fund site assessment section. Most comfortable in the nuanced and challenging world of emerging contaminants, he supports teams tackling SA's vapor intrusion drinking water lookback project. In addition to essay's work related to the public water systems impacted by per and poly floral alkal substances or POS, he holds a master's of science degree from the University of Minnesota duth, a bachelor of science degree from Northland College and is a professional geologist with the state of Minnesota. When not seeking out POS and vapor intrusion, Chris enjoys active uh staying active via cycling, crosscountry skiing, curling, and indoor climbing. lives in South Minneapolis with his wife and takes full advantage of easy access to trails along the Mississippi River with their dog Blitzen. So, welcome Chris. Come on up. >> Thank you. All of that is fair game for questions later, so please talk to us. We're in the back. Thank you. Uh thanks again, Nick, for your invitation here. I'm going to share our small but targeted role uh with Rosemont right now. Um but please again follow up um our contact information will be at the end if we are uh having more questions. So with that let's get started. I just want to I personally I start every talk with our mission. So it is to protect and improve the environment and enhance human health. As Sam mentioned we primarily work on industrial contaminants. So the not naturally occurring type of stuff. So please don't ask about grow gross alpha or metals or other things. I'd love a conversation, but I'll say talk to these fine folks over here. So, thanks again. Um, in in explaining what the PCA is, we do a lot of work, and I just want to point you to our web page and to click around and to encourage you to hover and to to look into more detail. This is actually a screenshot from our homepage, which is PCA.state.mn. us. And we're organized into air, into water, into land, and climate. We have a lot of intersectionality between those different areas. But I'm purposely highlighting the remediation and redevelopment again for the public water space to just say, okay, that's when a release occurred. How do we clean it up? What kind of thing do we do there? Oh, sorry. Little little higher. Okay. Sorry. This is a little Can I stay? Okay, we'll try. Is that better? Okay. Sorry. Um, where'd you lose me? So this is our web page pca.state.mn. us. Please look in there, reach out with questions. Again, air, water, land, climate. And what is kind of lost in this web page, but what I like to remind people is we generally do three things with contamination. We try to prevent it if at all possible. We try to manage it when we can't really prevent it. And then we ultimately have to clean it up when that release occurs. Investment in the first two buckets leads to huge savings on that third bucket. you know, again, if we if it's in the environment, if it's in groundwater, when we have to find where the release was, we have to ultimately, you know, develop treatment solutions, that's really costly versus, hey, let's not put it in a landfill. Let's kind of prevent the the flow of that contamination. So, just want to also highlight um really great work from our um colleagues at the PCA on Amara's law. You might have noticed there's less options of cookware at the at the stores now. Well, that's because of POS bands and other consumable products. Um, which again, Department of Health could speak to a little bit more about the whole exposure of POS and how drinking water is just one component there. So, again, remediation division and site assessment or SA. Thanks for again the the long intro. Um, MDH samples public water systems, not PCA. Um, we don't regulate drinking water samples at all. So, what do we do? Well, we have a long history working with MDH to say, okay, contaminants are found in these public water systems. Where might they be coming from? Can we use the super fun law to figure out, hey, is there a poller that caused this impact? Is there other private wells at risk? Is it even a real release? Is this some artifact of sampling? That's what we do and we coordinate with health very regularly. We've done that for decades on POS and other types of industrial contaminants. Um so really the three goals in focus are you know confirm the release of the contamination um determine the source and then also sample other areas or private wells that may be at risk for that contamination. I do want to be open about expectations of all three of them is that takes a lot that's a lot of work and that takes years to get to that point where we as an agency are confident to say yeah we think this private well might be at risk for the contamination that is that we're observing in the public water systems you know especially in remediation we unfortunately do not go and have an ambient program we want to use our super fund law appropriately and we ultimately want to say okay this is the point source with the contamination that's how our regulations work um and we just want to adhere to that. So, that being said, I really want to encourage everyone again to look in our web page. Uh these two um tools are really helpful and interactive. The first one is what's in my neighborhood. Don't be scared when you find that. There's going to be a lot of points there. That's everything from our agency. That's all the prevention. That's all the management and the cleanup. There are a lot of dots there. It can be a little anxietyinducing. Take a deep breath, look into it, click a dot, find out some more information. The other one I want to highlight, the Minnesota groundwater contamination atlas. That one, as a geologist, I tend to favor just because it's got some plume boundaries, some polygon, something a little bit more than just that dot. And that'll actually say like what contaminants were detected. And you could even download that data from there as well. Um, with that, that's really my my whole talk to just say again, we work on these issues at other cities um, facing similar challenges. Our timelines are fairly involved and we, you know, coordinate and try to um, sample private wells um, that might be at risk. If you got a letter from us, please respond um, and we'll just go from there. Lindsay's in the back. I'll be here. Welcome all questions. Uh, Emily on my team is also available as well. So, thanks again. >> Thank you, Chris. Last up in our panel uh will be Brent Bestie from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. And before I give his introduction, the the leading uh cause for us having him here to share information is that there's a lot of questions and concerns about water supply in general, sustainability of aquifers, what is growth going to do to those uh will we have enough water for the future and those sorts of concerns. It's uh definitely a pre-minent topic lately. Um, the DNR is charged with managing statewide the groundwater supply resources that we have and there are extensive permitting process processes that each public water supplier must go through in order to get a approved allocation or what's called an appropriation permit that says this is how much water collectively you as a public water supplier meaning city of Rosemount or any other community can pump out of the ground any given year. And so we've been operating under an existing permit on that for a number of years now, but we're in the process of asking for an increase to that. I mentioned earlier, we're about to get uh our latest brand new well online and we will have additional pumping capacity that comes with that. You all know that the city's been growing uh quite a bit in the last handful of years here. So, we need to plan and be ready for that future uh trajectory uh of water supply and so the DNR has an overarching responsibility to manage that and Brent's going to talk a bit about how that all works. Uh Brent is a water resources planner with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and has been with the DNR for the for the last 11 years with nine spent reviewing groundwater use permits across southern and southwestern Minnesota. In Brent's role as the water resources planner, he coordinates large water related projects to ensure consistency across different technical groups and partner organizations. Brent holds a bachelor's in meteorology and hydraology from St. Cloud State University and a master's degree in public administration from Hamlin University. Welcome, Brent. We're just going to do we're just going to do this because it works easier for me. Um, hi everybody. Thanks Nick. Um, as Nick said, my name is Brent. I'm a water resources planner with the DNR. Um, I work in our division of ecological and water resources. Many of you are probably more familiar with our parks and trails divisions or fish and wildlife. Don't ask me about parks. Don't ask me about fishing and hunting regulations. We don't work there. Um, that's what I my uh please don't ask um stuff. My focus is groundwater availability and groundwater quantity and how we relate those messages to the public. So, at DNR, everybody that uses more than 1 million gallons of water per year or 10,000 gallons of water in any given day is required to obtain a water appropriation permit from us. If you stop by our booth, I have a little map that shows where all those permit locations are within the Dakota County area. There are a lot of permits that includes irrigation, industry, um, municipalities, anybody that directly appropriates water from either a groundwater well or a surface water intake. That's very important to distinguish between the fact that we do not permit those connected to the municipalities. We regulate the municipality because we feel that they can um, handle and manage their water system with the authorizations that they currently have. DNR reviews all permit applications and permit requests, amendment requests the same way. Full technical analysis is done on each one of them. We have a whole list of things we review for everybody. We can require testing. We can require monitoring. We can require a number of things to ensure sustainability and that the groundwater resource is well protected into the future. One of the things we often do is require aquifer tests, but we do have the authority to wave that aquifer test if we feel there's enough available information. And often times we do that. So right now Rosemount has an authorization of 1183 million gallons of water per year or roughly 1.2 billion gallons with eight active water supply wells. That authorization they're seeking is up to 1350 million gallons or 1.35 billion gallons of water. It's a lot of water, but in context, all of the neighboring communities in this area have similar similar authorizations. Our review is in progress to ensure that that will be sustainable and not interfere with any domestic wells in the area. DNR um is guided by state statute and state statute requires us to ensure that domestic water supplies are not impacted by other users and if they are there is a process to resolve that interference situation. Many communities have gone through it, many industries have gone through it and a lot of irrigators have gone through it. this morning. Uh we I've learned there's actually five active investigations um right now or five well interference reports um verbally throughout the state with the ongoing drought. Um you may be familiar with Blaine in 2022 I believe it was that had roughly 50 well interferences um up in that area. So excuse me, sorry about that. Um either it's fallen there or fallen here. Um so it's something we deal with on a regular basis. There's a well-worn process and we're working through this. Rosemount has provided all of the information necessary that we've requested work through this permit um amendment process. They are in compliance with their permit current permit and everything like that. So, all right. So, one of the things I did want to share is Nick mentioned that the city is growing. This is evident in the changing water use and the changing population. You can see the population trend over the last 40 or 20 years, 25 years, as well as the water use over the last 25 years. DNR has water use history going back 40 years and even longer just on paper, not in our online systems. Rosemount's growth with population is consistent with the growth in water use and is consistent with the proposed increase in authorization from the DNR. I just want to make sure to point that out as everything has been fairly consistent. You can see though that in 2019 a very very wet year is very different than a very very dry year in 2023. So there is room to work on conservation and improvement and things like that um especially during the summer months. Um but that is working with all of you um on some of that information and processes. So what does DNR actually go out there and do? Well, we've got a lot of water use data that I mentioned. We are monitoring groundwater levels. Valerie mentioned our network. If you search DNR CGM, it will pull up DNR's network of roughly,00 active dedicated observation wells throughout the state of Minnesota. If you zoom into that map, you can get a number of wells that are right here in Dakota County and in Rosemount. On top of that, we have another 500 plus additional wells that are operated by those that we have required to monitor as part of water appropriations permits. Rosemount is one of those. Rosemount has provided the necessary data that we have required. I believe Nick, it's even AC up to date offline. We're pretty darn close. Um, and if it's not, it's because we're still doing QAQC work on that. So, we also have streamflow data. We want to make sure that the streams are maintaining that the proper flows and that we're meeting those conditions that are necessary and during drought that we have the authority to suspend surface water appropriations if that water level falls too low in our streams. Those are new things that we're we're just actually talking about. um right now at in our offices because of the severe drought we're seeing in the northern part of the state. Um permit water level data as I mentioned Rosemount provides that that we do actually require a permit ease in many situations to insert ensure that resource protection. So water supply planning is another thing that we do. Um any municipality more than a thousand people is required to complete a water supply plan every 10 years. Rosemount has an approved water supply plan with the next renewal due in the next couple of years. Um they our water supply planning looks at that cumulative water use across all areas um to ensure and we're trying to get this time to work together with both the Met Council local communities to kind of look at that cumulative impact across the board. Um it looks at projections both the population change and estimated you know what we expect um water use to look like over the next 5 to 10 years. And then there's that regional um planning and coordination side of things. Um as Nick said in my bio, I I am a statewide person that helps out on a lot of projects. I'm filling in helping out because we have a lot of local people that do really good things, but they happen to be out of the office this week or have other priority or prior commitments for tonight. If you guys have questions, reach out to any of these three individuals. Joe Richtor is your guys's uh water appropriation hydraologist for this area. Um, Alex is filling in right now as the area hydraologist if you have any questions on lake permitting or any surface water issues. And then their supervisor, Jack Leon, is also available um for questions. And you can always reach out to me as well and I'll probably point you in their direction, but if you have questions in other parts of the state, I'm more than happy to answer them. And I just want to say thank you guys for having me tonight. Um, it's always fun to get out and introduce our programs that are not well known to everybody out here. So, thank you very much. Thanks, Brent. I I think we finally figured it out that holding the microphone and your hand floating around was probably the the best idea from the beginning. So, um, couple more things before we send you back to the tableing and being able to interact one- on-one with all of our our guest speakers and other colleagues that have joined us tonight. Uh I just want to touch on the next steps that we have in our process with respect to addressing gross alpha. And so what that will be is we're we're in the middle of doing more the financial picture of things. We Chris uh Larson pointed out the relative costs that each of the options had associated with it. So we need to understand what that sort of expenditure means in terms of uh setting water utility rates and what the what the delta might be as a result of making an investment like what is on the uh the decision matrix that you all have. uh along with that we would have operational uh efforts that are associated with any of those options and those also have a cost uh associated with them. So we need to bring that information together and have the full totality of the picture in order to progress to the next step which is going to be final consideration and decision-m by our city council. And we're very much on track to achieve that point yet within 2026. We've always had this goal of getting to that decision point in 2026 so that uh we can move into a final design and construction of whatever the solution may be starting as early as 2027. And uh the matrix if you read it will point out there is a range of timelines for any of the particular solutions generally from one year one construction season on up to 3 to four years in the case of building a water treatment plant in particular the the one that was highlighted that would be that would require the several miles of of transmission water manes. So just wanted to cover that ground for a little bit. Um, we'll take about five to 10 more minutes here. I I do, as Lee pointed out at the beginning of of the event here. We have received a number of additional questions in the last couple of days uh through our website portal and uh we we did also receive a lot of questions that had previously been asked and for which we already have a frequently asked question published on the website. So, I'm not going to touch on those so much because they're already there, but I will get into a few more fresh or newer ones here. And I'll start out with uh with the water from all the cities well combining in the distribution system. Again, I mentioned that at the beginning in covering the characteristics of our system that water blends as it travels through those miles and miles of pipe and into our water towers and so forth. Uh but with the water coming from all the wells combining, has a city considered testing the gross alpha levels in the distribution system in addition to at the wells? And the answer to that is we're we're already we we really are at this point of we're moving towards a solution uh to address it at at the point source. And we did discuss this with the department of health when we first received the violation that is system blending an allowable u solution to this issue. uh whereby whatever level of blending happens in the system happens. It's not necessarily controlled as it would be in the solution that Chris mentioned where you bring it to a point and you have some specialty equipment that has controls over it to to dial things in. Uh you just allow water to travel through the pipes and do what it does and you get a result out and it may differ from place to place. That's not an allowable solution. So, we're moving past that. And so, with that, there really wasn't a need that we saw to to uh go down the path of of testing those gross alpha levels in and around the city. Uh, another question that that was generated uh was with respect to I think frequency or just the speed at which we could get gross alpha or any other types of tests back sooner. And the question was, has a city considered testing for gross alalfa using a lab that can get the results back more quickly? Uh we've taken all of our guidance and direction on testing cadence and uh sample taking from Department of Health. uh really that it it's no different than any of the other routine regular tests that we are having to conduct throughout the year where there is a built-in schedule of when those samples are collected, when they go to the lab, and when we would expect the results to be delivered back. I would maybe ask if Sam could speak to that a little further and just explaining uh the overarching management that the Department of Health has in having to to do lab analysis and testing for all public water suppliers in Minnesota. So, it's a it's a lot more than an isolated case where only Rosemount is having to to deal with having samples tested. So, Sam, >> yeah. So um as it regards as it relates to testing of gross alpha and these radionucleides uh we have to follow some EPA standards. They set the methods and they say this is the way to test the samples. And if you're curious about the exact methods or the speed, we do have some people from our public health lab here to answer some questions. But in general, uh the method just takes a very long time. It's there's a lot of chemistry that goes into it. Um, and it's just not a quick process. It's just designed to take a long time due to the nature of the chemistry. Thanks, Sam. I I'll stay on uh sampling and testing, so I might be handing the microphone back to you. Apologize ahead of time. Uh I touched on this a little bit ago. Well, number seven, it's on emergency backup status. it it hasn't pumped at all in the in the year uh or so that we've had it in that in that uh condition. Uh well number seven is on emergency backup status. Um so the there's some results that are that are reported in terms of the gross alpha levels and there there is a sample summary sheet on the back table and this is also on our website as well. But uh the question had to do with the the level that is uh was most recently found there was quite high for gross alalfa. Well um it it's listed out right now as NA for test results. And um what we're really getting at there is it's not considered to be an operational well. It's only used if we're in such a dire scenario that we have a massive fire in town and we have to turn it on. that would be the only purpose for which that well ever would get used. But um what we understand is that the the reason for no further sampling taking place there is because of that status. It's now essentially by department of health standards it's been deactivated. So I don't know if you can expand on that at all Sam. >> Yeah. So when we set when a well is set to emergency status um there's no testing for chronic contaminants because that would be you need decades of exposure over the limit to expect any sort of health risk. Emergency wells are tested once annually for nitrates uh because nitrate is an acute contaminant. It can be immediately dangerous particularly for infants. Um so the emergency wells are tested for these short-term acute contaminants. Thank you. I'll jump over to more of a volume or uh demand or usage question here and this was with regard to uh the I'll I'll read the question directly here. Can you speak about industrial water usage specifically as it relates to the metadata center uh and how much they will be using and the impacts to our groundwater supply and if uh and so forth. What what we have with this project is there is a water capacity agreement that uh between the city and meta still working. There it goes. Uh where we we have agreed to be able to supply up to a 100,000 gallons of capacity in our system. And when we're talking about like the numbers that Brent rattled off a little earlier, that relative to the overall city is is very very insignificant. What what I what we tie that back to is that is a peak usage number that is going to happen perhaps just a few times a year during the warmer months and the purpose of that would be affiliated with on-site irrigation uses. Um Meta's explained that it expects their typical daily usage for most other times of the year would be a third to maybe a quarter to a third of that. So you're in that um 25 to 35,000 gallery range to support the uh employees and staff working there and some other uh internal HVAC processes and those sorts of things. But um this that expected peak and typical daily volume is not unusual at all for an industrial business type of use within the city. And in fact, there are many other properties or facilities already within the city that utilize either that same or similar type of volume or more. Um, so with that, the amount of water use that we expect to see from that project, that site, it's it's all in line with uh what we already had for projections of overall city demand and supply uh capacity of our system uh heading into the future. Couple more here. Uh, one of them I think this this came up uh before maybe a few weeks ago. We we heard this perhaps at a city council meeting about the city considering a notification system that alerts residents when water from well number eight is being pumped. Uh it's important to reiterate like like I stated earlier, well number eight is at the back of the line. it's turning on last in order to provide water into the the system. And uh with that being only only coming into play when there's higher demands um that there's a lot of fluctuation across the system daytoday. You know, you get a cooler day like the last couple of days with rain. We're not operating too many wells because there isn't irrigation happening. Um there might be a structure fire that would ramp things up uh from time to time. These are conditions that we can't predict dayto day. They're they're going to change off and on. And so with that, there's not a a practical way in um nor is it mandated through regulations or otherwise that notifications are required to be provided. Uh and again I think I' I'd maybe uh look for sir some commentary from department of health as far as what they see or how this fits into their overall regulatory stance on the city with respect to gross alpha. So I'm sorry stam to keep handing it over to you but >> well what you said is uh correct from a regulatory perspective. Uh the Department of Health does not have the authority to require, you know, a public notification every time that the well is turned on. The the EPA states, you know, there's this quarterly public notice requirement and that is uh sufficient notice to the public. >> Thank you. Uh I think lastly here before we go back to breakout session is and this was a common question asked along the way and I heard it again a couple of times tonight before we started the the presentation sessions. I live close to a a well am I at a higher risk of contamination exposure. because we operated an interconnected system where all wells can contribute water into the same network of pipes and that that water can travel uh various distances depending on the push and pull of where the demands are coming from. Um it's there there's limitations on on that. We we no one well serves just a a circle uh directly adjacent to it. there water can travel throughout the system and for that um you know that we we consider the risk to be approximately equivalent across the system. So that is why we're addressing things in a way that would apply to overall system operation and management. So I'm going to leave it at that for the Q&A the the submitted questions part of it. Um, as we wrap up here, I just want to thank our entire panel again for uh contributing a couple hours of their time, not only here tonight and joining us, but the work that they've done along the way and prep uh prepping and preparing for this event. Uh we've been working on this the last six or so weeks and pulling things together and number of meetings, conversations, of course content assembly with the slideshow that uh you've all seen. But uh they deserve a lot of credit and appreciation for it. So I want to thank them and and if you could join me in a round of applause. So that ends the presentation component of the event tonight. We'll return back to the the tables and the booths at the back of the room and along the hallway there. Again, a lot of handouts there that you can all grab and links to websites, conversations to have one-on-one uh for any questions that we may not have addressed in the presentations or other things that uh you you've thought of along the way. So, thank you. Heat. Heat.