Successfully Establish a Stormwater Utility

Good morning, and welcome to successfully establish a stormwater utility webinar. I'm glad you've all joined us for this discussion. Let's jump right in. Luke, strategic solutions consultant here at Brightly, will be our moderator today. Luke comes from a background in energy automation and HVAC controls and has been with Brightly Software for about ten years. After receiving his FMP in twenty seventeen, Luke is focused on both sides of asset management world, day to day operations and long term strategic capital planning. Luke spends his work days at his home office juggling his four year old son, Everett, new baby, Elizabeth, and his attorney wife, Alex. Luke's current role as strategic consultant allows him to consult with civic leaders, helping to establish clear and justified capital plans. Welcome, Luke. The floor is yours. Thank you, Tracy. Welcome, everybody. Excited to be here today. We've got a great I think a great set of content to cover, stormwater utility. I know for all the people I talk to, stormwater tends to be one of those things that is always, second or third on the list until it goes really bad, and then it becomes number one very quickly. So, hopefully, today can be a a good conversation to kind of mitigate some of that. So, I've got two experts here with me from a from a Withers Ravenel. Dori Sabad, the director of the stormwater, practice group there, and Shannon Moore, director of the financial services group at Withers. So we're really gonna dive in and kind of explore what does it take to set up a a stormwater utility, what's that best approach. So Dorty here, our our our stormwater leader, with Wither Ravenel, seasoned engineer and project manager with over twenty years experience, working in municipal water, transportation, and private sectors. A lot of technical expertise coming from Dory, hydraulic modeling, natural systems protection restoration, watershed management, infrastructure design, dam engineering. We can keep going here. But the background's very extensive with the project development, the planning, the scoping, the budgeting, QAQC of those projects, making sure we're capturing the right data, and then the construction service. So big focus with client staff management, stormwater professionals for private customers as well as municipal customers there at Withers. He's also a certified GIS pro in erosion and sediment, designer. So, Dory, thank you very much for joining us, and welcome. Thank you. And, Shannon here, the other the other half of our dream team, over twenty years experience as well in the financial side, working both private and public. Recently, she was the finance director for City of Salisbury here in North Carolina, overseeing city finances, debt management, you know, the the, city accounting, purchasing, budgeting. I think a lot of us know what finance does, but the list keeps going on as well. But but a lot of big responsibility in the service department around establishing that that utility rate model enhancement to the capital program. During her time there at at the city of Salisbury, Shannon was a part of the team that implemented their utility startup. So went from stormwater being kind of just another another expense to actually having utility fund for it. So, including different studies to update those expenses and those costs. So it'll be good to get the insight from, Shannon as well. So we're pleased to have you both here. And, if you guys are good, we can start with the first question. Great. Fantastic. Welcome. So, I wanna start I wanna start with kind of a higher level one. Personally, I have a house down in Fuquay, Varina, that is on the edge of a floodplain. It's not technically in a floodplain, but I was doing research on it. According to FEMA, flooding is the most common and most one of the most expensive natural disasters in the US. So obviously, stormwater is extremely important. Can you talk a little bit about why establishing a utility for stormwater is kind of one of those most important first steps? Yeah. Perfect. I can start really with the high level overview and, to, piggyback on what, Luke, you just mentioned initially. I mean, stormwater used to be like third, maybe fourth on this, on the list of priorities. And we have come a long way since we used to say stormwater just water flows downhill. Like, we really need to manage stormwater effectively and efficiently. And we have concerns both flooding that you mentioned as well as the water qualities and the regulatory environment. So, really, it has become a more predominant issue that needs to be addressed by municipalities. And a good way to look at it is first inventor and assess what you have, like, the assessment of the system that you have as a municipality, how you can manage it, and then start to do your planning, master planning, to identify some hot spots, some deficiencies, and how to fix them. And from there, you can go to your engineering, construction, and maintenance. And that cycle, it's just a circle that keeps going further. And on top of that, you will have to meet some regulatory requirement. Like, if you are an MS four municipality, you need to manage your stormwater and report on how you are managing it accordingly. So that's a big high level overview, and we can dig more into the detail later. The last item on top top of this is, like, really, it's easy to list all what's needed. But every single item of those will require funding, and this channel can also provide some input on the funding. Yeah. So in addition to the technical aspects that Dori talked about, there's a finance mechanism that has to be utilized to pay for stormwater services. Those can be funded through the general fund, or those can be funded through what we call an enterprise fund, which is essentially a separate set of books, to manage the stormwater revenue and the stormwater expenses. And so with that, you set up user fees, just like a water and sewer utility, where users pay into, the fund to create a funding mechanism to pay for some of the capital needs. In addition to user funds, you also have opportunities, with some state and federal grant funding programs that will pay for sometimes planning grants, to do some of that master planning, and engineering assessment that Dori spoke about. And then also you have planning grants, or sorry, construction grants that help you pay for capital improvements. And of course right now with a lot of flooding across the U. S, there's opportunities where there's resiliency, improvements through your stormwater control and stormwater management services, that you can often find, federal and state grants to pay for some of those large capital costs. So definitely have to have a funding mechanism to pay for all of the technical aspects, that Dory's team put together. So, So, Shannon, I I have a question on that. So a little bit off script, but when if somebody's going after starting that stormwater utility and they wanna obviously, everybody wants free money. So going after that state and that federal, the EPA grants, all that that good information. Do do those types of of processes, those types of grants and and federal state funding, do those typically come before somebody has established a utility? Or is that something we establish utility, then we kinda go after that that bucket of money? Or is it kinda just depending on the on the on the municipality? So it depends on the funding source, typically. Sometimes there are planning grants where communities want to explore the option of starting a stormwater fund, and they don't really have anything yet. And so it helps them with the startup. And then there are some planning grants that if they're running their program through, say, the general fund and they wanna do some additional analysis to actually start a stormwater utility fund, a separate entity apart from the general fund, there's sometimes some costs that will go into some of that planning. So it it really varies by the funding round and by the funding source. Are these typically one one bucket of money that does four different things or these four different kind of grant opportunities depending on where you are in your process? Yeah. So it depends on the need of the client and kind of where they are currently in their journey. Oftentimes, the planning grant is kind of the start, of the process. And then later, once you've established from Dore's side of the house on the engineering side, your master planning and some major capital, you can start going after some of those larger construction grants. Got it. Okay. Alright. Well, sorry about the side note. I was just I was curious about that. So I wanna I wanna dig a little bit to what what Dory said a second ago, about about that. You know, you mentioned kind of a process there with with gathering the data, the assessing, the planning, the engineering, the construction, the maintenance. So I've I've heard a lot, you know, comes to capital improvement plans, CIPs, but then we also have master plans. I wanna talk a little about kind of how those how those compare and contrast in terms of decision making, you know, creating different rules and ordinances and budget, but basing budgets on those different types of documents. Any insight in there, Dorey? Yeah. Absolutely. And that's that's a great question, actually, because it's always leads to infusion. A lot of municipalities sometimes we see it. It's like we're trying to develop a capital improvement plan or just list the items that are needed, but it's always a reactive decision rather than a proactive. And that's where the master planning comes to play. So you will have to plan ahead and let your master planning guide your capital improvement and get guide your decision making as well as doing the assessment. So so we're looking at in two types. So you can do your inventory to know what you have first, do your assessment of the system. What's the age? What's the criticality? What is the consequence of failure? Criticality, and, to evaluate all those. And this will guide you in, knowing to be able to look ahead and see what is coming in terms of maintenance and replacement needs. And then with doing the master planning also, you will study your area, identify deficiencies where you you are lacking the correct infrastructure And then you start to evaluate some alternatives, and then you prioritize everything based on, the impact, environmental impact, social impacts, and the the technical, return on that investment to improving your level of service that you are providing to specific communities. And that will allow you to prioritize your projects where you want to go from them. And, really, it will help you to maybe identify source of funding. You asked about the funding for it because for each type of project, and that's what Shannon was talking about, like, different types of projects and grants that are available, you will have different venues. There are grants available to even help with the master planning and go forward. Some of the grants that we have seen recently will give additional credit if you evaluate the possibility of establishing a stormwater utility. Mhmm. And that will be just extra points on how your project will score because a lot typically, every grant almost is on a competitive basis and you need to select projects that will rank accordingly. So that's where, having that master planning will allow you to develop a CIP that is based on a good study and evaluation rather than a problem that happened, and we're trying to take care of it. And we're going to put a patch in here until we are going to find some way to take off it, take care of it more in details. And one thing in here while talking about the the funding sources and guiding it to the CIP, even at that level of the project, it's good to start to engage with the elected officials on the stormwater utility and what are the benefits of having a stormwater utility actually for the community to be able to support that system, that stormwater system. Once you present the needs to the elected officials, they can take it and make decisions and inform, their citizens that this is what we need. That's why we're doing it. It is not just an additional tax in here. It's more like a utility similar to how you get your water at home, and it is run as a utility. We need to think of it the same way and having that, engagement early in the process will garner public support and elected officers support much better. Interesting. And this this might be kind of a loaded question because I I think I know the answer, but I'm trying to fully kinda grasp it. We you mentioned level of service a few times. You mentioned funding, and we've mentioned gathering data. So kind of putting those together. If if I'm if I'm at square one, I maybe I haven't done an inventory today. So my first step really is to go out and just figure out what do I own, where is it all located. You know, I I would think the kind of the core information we would wanna know is, you know, where where is that item located, you know, what is the capacity of that of that item, how much stormwater can it handle? Maybe when was it installed? Material things, things like that. Is there a standard kind of approach when you're capturing that a very first step of assessing data of of what type of information we could be capturing. And I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a follow-up question about level of service. So and, yeah, that for you, Please. Yeah. I can start with that one. This one we don't, because it's a good question. And there is I mean, we have a good operating procedure. We established procedure of how to go about with that one. So that basic data collection, we will start with trying together what is available because there's always some sources that are available, and we want it to be the most cost efficient way of doing a data collection. Start from scratch is not good, but having a good solid data from the beginning will make the process much better. So, really, that's the building block for any assessment. And we have developed, a database design and everything that will allow us from the start of the project, know what we need to collect because we need to know the end board. We always want to look at the end board before you start the collection so that you don't miss anything and have to redo some of that work. So we have developed a standard database where we can enter the information that is needed in terms of doing the hydraulic modeling, the hydrologic modeling, and all that information to assess the capacity of the system. But also it has the flexibility because there are specific needs within each community that will allow you to, add items to it. For example, some communities might be doing certain level of easement acquisitions or maintenance of private systems that they need to capture that difference between who owns what or if they have some agreement with other municipalities of who is doing what, and we can tailor that database for it. So really, the initial step is that data collection, knowing where things are geographically, knowing how they work hydraulically, And then from there, we'll take it to assessing the capacity, identifying which ones don't meet the capacity and how to fix them. And also while doing the mapping, we do an assessment of the condition of the system. So when we are there, we can do an initial visual inspection of the system, identify how they are. And if any maintenance only is needed, we'll add that right or if any items are treated in a critical condition that they might fail recently, as soon, then we'll adjust that. And we could take it further some items where they find them that you need further investigation in the field, and that's where we could do some CCTV. So we're on cameras inside the pipes to identify some of the conditions in there and, without making it too big, usually breaking it in chunks is really good. So it could start even the assessment could start by high priority areas that that's where we need to do the inventory, the assessment, and then you can build on it. It can stay a dynamic database that you keep growing it and, expanding it as needed. Interesting. And, Barag, the second question is kind of off the cuff, but do do do people have to assess every linear foot of every stormwater pipe in every culvert, or are there strategies to kinda say, hey. You know, we've got this section of town that was all built in nineteen ninety, and we're gonna assess twenty five percent of the stormwater structures and apply logic. Is there is there anything like that from the stormwater standpoint? Yeah. Early on, we'll start the initial assessment. We can do, like, a desktop assessment based on condition of the overall area. Like, we look at the overall area. You mentioned when it was built, that's a critical item. We have the material of the part that was installed. We know what installation techniques was used in that, and we can start to see some. If we know of failures that are happening, then it will bump it to a higher priority. This way, they don't have to assess each and every pipe from the get go. But you want to keep a record of what has been assessed, what has what has not. And then once you have established funds made for it, you can say, I'm going to inspect twenty percent of my system every year. So because this we we mentioned at the beginning, it's just a it's a circle. So once you are done, you get to start again because you have to keep inspecting them and and going through that and putting that vision that okay we're going to be inspecting these twenty percent next year these twenty percent and once you are on a rotating basis you don't have that as many surprises. Mhmm. But there's always some of them that will come up, but you can, minimize them. Right. I had great quote. I heard one time somebody said, you never you never get hit by the bus that you see coming. Right? He said that it's never the project on the list that you have that fails that causes the catastrophic event. It's always the project that's not on that list. And everybody's like, wait a minute. We didn't know that was gonna happen. And that's that's the buzz that always ends up hitting you. And the final piece on this, Jordan, just you mentioned we mentioned level of service, and I love the idea of level of service because, you know, especially in the municipal world, level of service, you know, how good does it need to be? And and everybody wants everything to be perfect, but nobody wants to fund things at that level of perfect. So can you talk to me about what some of the ranges and some of the ideas behind level of service specifically with stormwater? Yeah. Perfect. That's a perfect question. It's actually and a lot of municipalities are tackling this really head on because the level of service in stormwater when we talk about it is what kind of storm event do you want to accommodate because it's not we're not going to be able to put just pipes that will accommodate every major storm event that occurs. And then do identify the risks associated with it, and it could be based on the locations. So major evacuation routes or, major streets will have a higher level of service than other minor streets. If you have a dead end or a street that is reaching a critical facility, you will increase that level of service. And this level of service is defined by that storm event. We talk about the one year storm event or ten year storm event or twenty five. And, and really, it's the probability of having a storm during any year. And it is the most common items for smaller streets are the ten year event and twenty five year design event. These are the very common items in North Carolina, although some municipalities don't have it. These are items that go in the ordinance to put here or in your design criteria and manual or you implement the requirement of level of service when the area is being developed. That is the storm design that you will offer it. And then you have, another level of service that relates to water quality, and that's a state requirement, for specific basins depending on which which basin you are in. You need to treat the water to a certain quality. And, on top of that, the local municipality has the option to go above and beyond what the state requires and that can be factored in. Typically, those water quality level of service are managed by doing a stormwater control measures. So putting a pond or some other treatment device before you release all the runoff from stormwater into open water bodies. But in terms of flooding, those are ugly. Design storm events over, major highways might have the fifty or even one hundred year event or we want to see it. And unfortunately, in recent years, we've been seeing an increase in the number of events. So we talked about probability that the hundred year event is an event that has a one percent chance of occurring in a year, but we're seeing several of them in any year and given year and consecutive years these days. So that's something that we need to look for. And some of the coastal communities were starting to analyze to see events and evaluate them for sunny day flooding, we're calling them. Because it's not raining, but because of the tides and what you get from the ocean you're starting to see the water back up into the storm system and streets are starting to flood just based on that event. So, we will also account for those factors when we are working in cost coastal areas. We have plenty of them where we'll account for variation in the sea level and the tide, that we're seeing. Interesting. Yeah. I I I know I've talked to a number of people out west that are having their their ten year storms. They're having two or three times a year these days. Yep. Sounds like that's nationwide. Yep. Yep. Alright. Well, let's shift a little bit. We mentioned we mentioned the general fund and we mentioned a enterprise utility fund. I think you'll both probably have have kind of things to say on this, but can you guys talk to me about the difference between the two and which one has an advantage and kinda how it has an advantage specifically for stormwater? Sure. So when we think of the general fund, we typically think of the stormwater being a department within that fund. Same thing like police, fire, parks, and recreation. And so oftentimes, the stormwater fund is competing with those other resources, for tax revenue. And so our preferable method is to see a stormwater utility run through a separate standalone enterprise fund very similar to a water and sewer utility. You think of it as kind of running a business. And so with a, separate stand alone enterprise fund, you have a dedicated funding resource, which is typically through user fees. Again, just like kind of a water and sewer, you have users within the services. They essentially provide the revenue, for that fund, and then the expenses run through a dedicated fund so that they are not competing with other services within a municipality or or a county. So, again, a preferable method would be to run it just like a business, and so you run it through a stand alone enterprise fund with user fees. And is that for operational money, like day to day stuff and also capital, or is it just one or the other? Yeah. So you want your revenues, to have an equal amount of expenses, and so that would include your your salaries for your employees to manage the utility. That would be your operations. That would be any kind of capital expenses. Your grants would come through that fund as a dedicated revenue source if you receive those. And so you don't want your revenues to be more than your expenses. But in a capital intense environment, like a stormwater fund, that's not, a difficult challenge to make sure that you have enough expenses, that are minimal to the revenue source. So that that seems like there's a challenge there because if we're, you know, operationally, we can probably take a step back, look at historic costs, look at our labor rates, look at our equipment costs, and kinda get an idea, pretty standard idea of what that operational need is. But from a capital standpoint, you know, everything's dying. So how how far ahead do you guys look? How far ahead should we be looking to say, hey. You know, over the next ten years, I have, let's call it, ten dollars worth of capital expense. Therefore, I need at least one dollar a year of capital expense in addition to operational. How how big is that window when people are doing these types of plans? So we like to provide, master capital cost planning for a five a minimum five. Usually, it's a ten year, kind of forward look. And, you know, sometimes those capital expenditures, there's not, grant revenue sources for them, and so a utility may have to take on debt. And so those debt payments would be part of that utility fund as well. And it does help spread some of those large capital costs over multiple years, oftentimes outside of that planning period. But we typically like to have at least a ten year planning period. Ten year planning period. Okay. Yeah. And, really, with all that, one item that stormwater utility helps with is there are requirements for communities now to abide by. There are some programs, mandated programs that are not funded like the MS four. So you have to meet all those requirements and having the money just in the general fund. You will end up trying to just Get what you can from the general month fund just to meet your requirements that are mandated and then all your planning and looking ahead and upgrade of your utilities take the back seat until something happens and then you have to run get something from the federal fund and maintain it. Well, if you have your own dedicated source of funding, you can take that proactive approach and plan things to your master planning assessments and the phases that we talked about early on. And the other item is that you can factor in that use those funds to really plan on what kind of grants you want to get, what do you want to target, and be able to supplement the funding of the utility to get whether state or federal grants or maybe even look at low interest rate for certain projects, large capital projects. And that's what Shannon was mentioning just earlier about, servicing that that you can take on a grant or a loan that is that has some favorable terms and pay them back with it. So really these are couple of the advantages also of having the dedicated funds rather than a fund that you can use it to do absolutely what you have to and then you're competing with others, that will not allow you to set, to reach the other priorities that you have on the list. So MS four is an interesting one because that is one that, you know, is it is a nationwide me, nationwide goal, but it does not seem to be a nationwide, point of of pain or point of interest. I've I've got some folks I've worked with who, you know, that's the first thing they wanna talk about is how do we get compliant? How do we show our documentation? I've got other folks I've talked to that, you know, MS what? You know, they're aware of it, but it's just not something they have to deal with. Can we take a second to talk about MS four? And and, you know, is every community needing to be thinking about MS four? Is there there certain qualifications for it? What's what's the deal with that? Yeah. There are qualifications for it. So once a community reaches a certain size and by next year, we're starting to we will have several other communities added to North Carolina. And typically, it's like at once the population is at ten thousand, that's when you become an MS four community. It can be a little bit less because if you are French communities and certain communities that are around a major area, then you can get also pulled into the program and the DEQ in here, runs the program, and it's a it's a federal program. But in here in the state, it's delegated to the DEQ to run it. And they are going through the process of, notifying the next the new communities next year. I believe that's, the schedule now. And we are starting to see plenty more audits and, actually, we're helping several communities in compliance with these audits. And some of the requirements of the MS four is to really inventory your system. And we talked about it in the beginning of having that inventory, knowing where your outflows are and doing some inspections on the outflows as well as inspecting the system. So, some of the smaller communities might not be as, might not need it as much in terms of being announced for if they are not there, so they don't have that expense. But even if they don't have it, typically, that general fund is lower if you have a smaller community. And with the cost of projects these days with the construction, it is hard to find fund capital projects just from a general fund because it will take a back seat. Anything that you want to do for planning, and that's what we've seen where a lot of communities like that ability to do the planning or to assess what they would need in the future. Over the last two years, we were lucky there were some available funds to do that planning and, grants that we submitted for. But it's not always the case that these, funds are available. And having that stormwater utility, even if it looks like a small amount initially, it will help you to plan and target the other brands, and you will have much more ability to receive money once you have a plan in hand rather than just saying, I don't know what it is. I just have a problem, and and we need money to figure it out. Mhmm. Yep. Those guys are the last to get funded typically Yeah. If it even comes. Yeah. Well, good. Well, Dore, you talked a little bit about I've got kind of two phases of this question. I I wanna talk about kind of the the the steps to creating that that that stormwatering tail of that enterprise fund. And then kind of shifting over, on on the finance side, I wanna talk about literally how how do we how do we look at user rates? How do we look at that cost? Per, you mentioned that that that that cost for a person. So, I know we talked about the assessing, planning, organizing the construction, but can you give me just or just a very, very high kind of your version of kind of what does it take to start a a enterprise fund for Storm? Yeah. So with that, I mean, usually, you run it in parallel, the two paths between the financing of it and the technical because you need to know how much you need in order to run your model and and see what kind of utility you want and how much, fees you need. And at the same time, you want to analyze the area that you have, your geographics, and see how to how do you want to structure and build your utilities. So all what we talked about before in terms of the technical, it helps support to understand the needs of the community and how would it feed into the financial model. And from there, we would have we'll start to run financial model and in parallel, we'll run with it. The GIS analysis we call it. It's really a desktop exercise of knowing what is the mix of the community. And we will get into those fees, how they are set, but typically, they can be set as flat rate or it can be based on the use and the the land use barrier. And that's where the Jayas exercise come comes in to identify these parcels, what they are, and what kind of revenue. But in here, I stop a little bit on the technical of GIS. I think if we talk about how to set those units and, fees with channel, and then we can talk about how the GIS is run is run to support this. Perfect. Yeah. Shane, I I I have to imagine setting the actual rate's gotta be very touchy. Right? Too low, you don't get anything done too high. People are gonna revolt. How does that how do you guys kind of walk through that process with setting that rate for for enterprise fund? So once we have established the technical side in terms of a budget to fund, the levels of service that the community needs, we establish a fee for users based on what we call an ERU, which is an equivalent residential unit. And so GIS has some tools that they can utilize to determine the impervious space for residential parcels. And typically, we take either depending on the size of the community, smaller communities, we may look at all of the residential parcels to figure out what that average impervious space is. For larger communities, we may do a five or a ten percent sampling, to get the average residential. And then that average residential is essentially set as the ERU for the community. And as Dorey spoke, we can either look at a flat fee per user, or we can look at an ERU equivalency, for the the multiplier on nonresidential parcels. And so typically, the most common approach to set a fee is once we determine the revenue needs, we kind of back that calculation into the mix between residential and nonresidential parcels in a community. And a common approach is a flat fee per residential, so we'll say five dollars. For a nonresidential, it's based on the ERU. So if you've got ten ERUs, you've got a really large footprint, then you may be paying fifty dollars, and that's typically a monthly fee. And then most communities will apply that either through the tax bill, which ties to the parcel owner, or it can go on the utility bill, which is based on whoever, receives the water and sewer utility. So there's really a a different approach for every community, and a lot of it depends on a look a first kind of glance at the GIS data to figure out what's the representation in a community. Is it a lot of really large parcels? Is it a lot of heavy residential? And so there's there's kind of a different approach based on the community's needs. Interesting. Okay. Yep. And then here Shannon mentioned the impervious area and really the idea behind the impervious area and why we use it as a measure is that's where you generate most of your run of soul. If we didn't have any of the impervious area, a lot of the rain will infiltrate will get captured on the spot. We don't have a lot of runoff that is going into the stormwater system that needs management. But once we start to add this, we're adding runoff, and we want some equitable way of that distribution, and that's where the ERU comes in. Because if we have a flat, fee of a large commercial area with a parking lot that is equivalent of several houses, maybe maybe a neighborhood almost, It's not fair to have the same homeowner pay that fee as as that commercial. So to a three day measure of having an equitable way of distributing the fee based on what you are contributing to the stormwater system. And that's a good gauge to have it there to use. Does anybody meter stormwater? Is that done in any larger industrial types of organizations? This is almost some type of metering because to be able to measure it, I mean, you don't want to put to be able to capture it and meter it by properties. So the it's a way of metering it is to measure what is your impervious because we have the science to say this impervious area You can work backwards. Generate this much. Yeah. Okay. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. And then I guess from a residential standpoint, you know, if if I'm paying five bucks a month for my size home and I decide I wanna add a big patio in the backyard and extend my driveway, does that have a a tangible effect, a tangible impact, or is that negligible? Typically, once we have the ERU and Shannon mentioned it depends on the distribution in the community of this. Like, if you're talking about the mansion, yes, you will have a tangible impact that is not the same as a typical single family home. And that's why we do an equivalent residential unit where this is the average of the community, and then it becomes a single fee for all the residential units because there is a good average. Now you have maybe some outliers sometimes that go out there depending on those community. You might Yeah. Have a tiered approach. But adding a patio onto a home or something typically would not impact that rate or, you you will stay within the same, as an as a residential unit. Alright. Good. Because I'm in I'm in Holly Springs. We extended our driveway, so I didn't know if I was gonna have to pay a few extra bucks each week. No. No. You would pay for your mention the same way. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Well, guys, that was awesome. I I I probably got fifty more questions I could ask. I know we've got a time limit here. So let me just open it up to the two of you guys. Any final thoughts or kind of closing remarks before we hand it back over to Tracy to wrap us up? Nothing from me on the technical. Maybe I'll just wait for the questions this way just to leave some room to be able to answer for everyone. Shannon, anything on your end? Yeah, I was just gonna add, you know, I come from kind of the finance side. And as Dori mentioned earlier, we definitely want to see equity when we set rates within the community. So that's that's very important. Questions that you have coming out of that conversation that you questions live. While we're waiting to see what kind of questions come in, Shannon and Dory, the questions that you did get during the conversation, were there any of those that you'd like to expand on a little for the broader audience? I'll touch quickly on the CCTV question. It can become too costly, too quickly to just go ahead and try to do CCTV for everything. So really start with a visual inspection. We can use some, wall cameras. It gives you three sixty degrees and an assessment of the age of the infrastructure, what we're seeing around the area, what was happening around that time will be, we will be able to, isolate which areas might need CCTV and then proceed that way. You can leave it as a last item and do it on the go and put it in the scheduled inspection. But, there's no need to start with the CCTV and expend most of the fund on that level of inspection while you could use some of it to actually implement some, maintenance or some upgrade and capital improvements. Excellent. Thank you. We'll go ahead and take a peek at the results of the poll. General based versus enterprise fund. Developing the stormwater management program, I was thinking that that would be a really good follow on to this discussion is is kinda looking at at the structure of the program, that this this that the utility would support. Service levels, I think that's definitely an area that we wanna address in the future in establishing user fees. Awesome. We'll definitely, take that feedback. Thank you all very much, and make sure that we, we continue to give you helpful information on this topic. I don't see any other questions. Information on this topic. I don't see any other questions coming in. I think that, Shannon and Dory and Luke just, completely, covered this topic so well. We we will follow-up with a couple of different assets and, pieces of information immediately after this. You will get a recording of this presentation that you can rewatch or share with your colleagues, and, we'll continue to bring this kind of education to you. So, hopefully, you found this very informative. Thank you so much, Luke, Dorey, and Shannon. I think this was a really meaty discussion, and, really appreciate your time and attention today. Have a great event or a great day. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.