Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Too bad, I'd say.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Sure. Yeah. K. Alright. Don't start. Okay. Great. Thank you. So this is Friday, 02/06/2026, and it is Senate institutions. And then we have two items or two individuals here. One item, we'll be looking at section nine of the capital bill and looking at dam safety programs and budget adjustment request. So, we'll go around and introduce ourselves because I don't know if you know about it. Wendy Harrison, I represent the Windham District.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Robert Plunkett, Bennington District.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Joe Major?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Joe Major, I'm sorry. Joe

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Major. Russ Ingalls, Essex District. John Benson, Orange District.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: Okay, and

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: then you can introduce yourself for the record and have your presentation. Good

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: afternoon. For the record, my name is Emily Bird. I'm the Watering Vet Sound Division Director, and I'm joined here by my colleague, Bennington, who is our Dam Safety Program Manager. Thank you for having us in this afternoon. We're here to present on requests under section nine of the capital budget adjustment and to provide some updates on our capital funding and projects. Yeah. And if there's time, we can walk you through some significant project work at the Waterbury Dam. Perfect. Thank you. Over to you, Ben.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Thank you very much. For the record, I'm I'm Ben Green, section chief of the Dam Safety Program. It says, most disabled participant screen sharing would be possible to get that on the news, please.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You sent another request. I'm sorry?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Kevin, if you may if you may call us to that

[Unidentified Committee Member]: permission. I reckon Scott Martin is

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And thank you, Scott. And I should have let

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: you to interview that. Thank you.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Thank you for being here.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Okay great, so as Emily said thank you very much for having us in today to discuss status and some issues items going on in Dam Safety Program. This cover slide is of Waterbury Dam, which if there's time again, can go through update on some product work that's going on there with the Army Corps of Engineers. Just to do a brief overview of our program for those not familiar, The dam safety program is located in the water investment division with the DEC. Our mission statement is is noted here. It's a little bit different than many others in DEC, and our primary focus is public safety relative to dams. We have two primary responsibilities and that is, number one is dam regulation and number two is dam ownership. And those two things take up about 50% of our time each. Our current staffing is that we're at seven people currently. We're trying to recruit two more to go to nine, is pretty exciting. When I started in 2017, there was two of us. So we're heading in the right direction there and very exciting to improve, increasing a lot of our capabilities. On the regulatory side, we operate under state statute 10 BSA Chapter 43 dams, where we regulate non federal, non power dams. And there's about, a total of about a thousand of those in the state, and we really focus on a subset of about 400 plus of those. On the ownership side, we directly own 14 state owned dams including the three Windhamski River flood control dams, Waterbury, Wrightsville, and East Ferry, and we do a wide variety of ownership activities with those including regular operations, maintenance, flood operations, monitoring, we do capital projects throughout the entire portion of the work. Basically all things an owner would do per facility we do for those dams.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Great, thank you. Are you good with questions as we go along? Sure. Anybody have any questions?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: She had the next kind of pivot to talk about the capital appropriations. We're actually gonna go back a little bit about fiscal year 'twenty three. We're gonna have fiscal year 'twenty six and 'twenty seven, and then also talk about our capital budget adjustment for $150,000 in the upcoming slides. This table here is basically the same table we've been presenting now for a couple of years. We used the same table last session and the text highlighted in green are updates on the individual projects and how we're using fiscal year 'twenty three, 'twenty six, and 'twenty seven monies to accomplish the projects. As a on an overall scale, we're doing fairly well, with with few exceptions. All of these projects are either in action right now, or are very nearly so in action, and, we're moving through with the plans for every one of these dollars. Happy to go down by line if you'd like to get out there on these projects. Have we done that for the house? I don't know if that's the level of detail you're interested in or not.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Well, it's hard to see them and I don't know. Maybe we have this somewhere, Scott, or if we can, I don't know? But it'd be good to have this available on our website. Sure. Just knowing our districts, can you just point out a couple that are

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Sure. I mean, I can kinda break I guess I can do it in, kinda pods so I go down through. Wrightsville Dam, is just up the street here, so that one's kinda near and dear to everybody that sits in this building. That's a big one. We are undergoing geotechnical exploration and erosion natural erosion study. That was a piece of work that kinda came out of a risk assessment that we did on a bunch, on 18 state owned dams back in 2024. That works moving forward. We're contracted with GEI consultants. We're doing some final planning phases for that, for the field work to occur this summer. The next six lines are all state owned dams that are going through a comprehensive assessment step, and they are all contracted and in progress right now with both of the field work going to happen this season and then the recommendations of the final report are to be delivered at the end of this year.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So can I ask you a question? So are all of these dams damaged or gonna stay? Because I know there's a fair amount of dams that should be removed.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: These dams that are staying. These are all for, we're all targeting rehabilitation projects. Nice. These, work.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: About midway down, we have noise pond dam, final design permitting, construction based engineering services. That design is underway. We recently received 60% design drawings that we're reviewing internally right now. We've had some internal, excuse me, public meetings to review the progress and take public input and moving forward with that project. In a future year, we'll be looking for an appropriation for construction of that, which at the moment the estimate is 1,800,000.0 for construction, although we'll have a better estimate as that design is completed. The next one online is Gale Meadows Dam And Dike, that's located in Londonderry, Vermont. That's a Fish and Wildlife owned dam. It took some pretty good damage to the auxiliary spillway following the twenty twenty three floods. We assisted Fish and Wildlife to design and install a temporary repair to that spillway, This line item is for the comprehensive assessment to basically assess the whole dam and figure out what we need to get that dam up the sonata. That work is largely complete. We've been billed for, there's a dam and a dike on that reservoir. They billed us for the dike portion and it's going be settled out in the next few months. That will all be spent. The next line is also a project at the Waterford Redsville Dam just up the road here. This is a project called the Flood Operations Flexibility Study. This is a project we've been trying to adhere to the Army Corps of Engineers since the twenty twenty three floods, as you may recall. In 2023 was that severe flood event, Whitefield Reservoir filled, flood control band within 11 inches of our auxiliary spillway. It was a tense time for many of us, and thankfully floodwaters receded and we didn't have that extra discharge of our auxiliary spillway. It raised some questions. It took some extended period of time for that water to evacuate out and raised some questions if there's an opportunity to improve some operational flexibility that dam that we don't currently have to make that, well, the dam didn't perform well, it may even perform better under future floods. This is a public assistance to the state's project that we're doing with the Army Corps of Engineers, which is a 50% cost share. Project's roughly $700,000 Our share is $350,000 The agreement is in house right now. It has to be signed by the thirteenth of this month. It's to be starting very, very soon and they're going be requesting, I believe, the $350,000 of our part upfront in the first fifteen days of the contract. Very shortly that will be zeroed out and that project will be running. So that's exciting.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That's great. So is that the construction of the project, not design?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: That's feasibility study and initial designs.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, so it's not going to be fixed yet?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: It's not going fix the issue. It's going to tell you the issue. It's a little bit of complex issue because the idea that we could move water pre event and portions during the event is largely contingent on the capacity of the North Branch between the dam and here, so it's going to be a careful survey of that. It's actually going to be very detailed modeling done to see where we have capacity and where we don't and what we could possibly do to make improvements on the outflows. It's a study project to look at that and then come up with alternatives if in fact it does prove out to be something that we could do and make sense to do, how would we do it?

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So there's a whole corridor study, right? Isn't that a corridor study, sir?

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: Well, may be familiar with river corridor planning. Maybe that's a separate initiative that we work through with our river rivers program to identify priority restoration projects. But I think what Ben is getting at is the this is a really comprehensive study looking at upstream and downstream of the dam and opportunities to maximize operations for flood control if in the event we face a similar or worse storm. Well, we'd like Yeah. Right? Exactly. So

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: I think we should say when.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: That's a very good point. Thank you.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Thank you, madam. Optimism.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Hey. We're the government. Yeah. Thank

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: you. Yep. A very positive project and we'll hopefully learn a lot about what makes sense and what we can do there. The next project on the list is called the DEC dams instrumentation installation project. This is for installation of some instrumentation and monitoring equipment at our dams. The design portion of this project is funded by general fund monies and is nearing completion and should be completed in March, so we're hoping to bid that work out and use that money to hopefully get installations in the ground as soon as this year with that money. That was originally, that one's marked green because that was originally $400,000 and we have another project we'll talk about in a minute that had some overruns at Waterbury Dam that we sort of used a little bit of the money from that, for that one down from 400 to $3.50 to keep the other project moving and that's part of our adjustment ask is to restore that money and get enough to finish up the other Waterbury project. That's significant for that reason. Silver Lake Dam is in Barnard. That's next to the State Park. That's a project that's hopefully moving to design here very soon. The RFP will hopefully be launched as soon as next week. I'm discussing that with the business office. Next two lines, Cat Pond Dam, which is located at Killington and Low Lake Dam, is located in Londonderry, planned for fiscal year $27 at $250,000 each. At this time, that will be available in July. May seek to do something a little bit different with those funds and if we do, we'll certainly let the committee know. Those projects are under comprehensive assessment right now, so they won't be ready for design in July, so the time is not quite right. I apologize, you may have gone over this, where it says hazard class. What is that designation? So dams in the state of Vermont and nationally are given one of three hazard potential classifications: high, significant, or low. A high hazard dam is one that if the dam were to fail, there's an improbable loss of life. Troy's Fill is a great example. A significant hazard dam is one as if the dam were to fail. Loss of life is not considered probable, but significant property damage, environmental damage, or life line loss is expected. Then the low hazard dam is one that if the dam were to fail, there would be little impact downstream, really have a great impact downstream. So obviously high hazard dams are sort of the ones that we put them on priority on and the significant lesser and lows are behind that. Do we assign for the high priority, do we assign do we want to get this done by x? Is there a time period that you Yes. The risk we did a risk assessment of the 18 high and significant hazard dams completed in 2024, and that helped us to wrap and stack them within the categories of hazard class, look even deeper into them, organize them by highest risk to lowest risk, they all have a degree of high risk. Using the word low is not really the right word to use there, highest to the least high risk. They're using that as our guideline for the order of priority of the projects. With few exceptions, we've a few that were already sort of in progress while that study was being done. And so those are still in the mix a little bit, but yes, then finally My pleasure. And I have a slide later on that kind of explains our methodology for projects as we go from initial risk assessment all the way through complete construction. Thank you, I appreciate it. That helps. Yeah, no problem at all. Then the last two lines on here, the first one is the requested budget adjustment, and I have a slide that could give a long explanation as to what we're asking for and why, but by and large we have a project going on at Waterbury right now. We're evaluating the tunnel and the penstock systems. Basically it's the way that water is most often conveyed from the reservoir through the dam and then to the little river downstream. We've been evaluating those and that project has had some overruns. We're requesting $150,000 to be able to complete that project, is ongoing, near depletion in the beginning, but ongoing, and also to restore some of the money that was taken from the dissertation project to restore that. We have a full funding for that project. The final line on here relates to DEC staffing where we use within the Water Investment Division, there's a group called the Agency Facilities Engineers. They're sort of like an internal consultant. They're Allstate employees. They all sit desks near ours, and they have professional engineering capabilities, survey capabilities, and to a degree we use our assistance on some of our projects to help keep them moving. They're usually very accessible, very cost effective. They do have limitations. They're not specialized in safety engineers, we can't use them on many projects, but in past years, when we've used them, they've always been part of our projects, you've seen that kind of in the total cost. This year, that cost was broken up kind of for transparency to show the amount of money that that was spent on on them, and perhaps someone can on that.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: So similar to forest parts and rec and fish and wildlife, the agency facilities team within our division provides engineering services directly to capital eligible projects. And so as the team is working on dam safety program projects, it we're only charging their time when they're working directly on the engineering and survey services for capital eligible projects. Just wanted to speak to that. I know there's been some concern over the years about staff time being charged to capital funding. So it's really just direct engineering on projects that would otherwise have to be outsourced to a consultant engineer.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That makes sense. Thank you. And then just a comment about staffing in general, this is my fourth year on this committee and it wasn't that long ago when you had two people. And so it's really important that you're full step fully staffed and that now you'll have nine. So did you did you have nine and then you went down? Or

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: So since I've been here, started, in 2017 we started with two, I think in 2021 we got to four, and then as recently as just a few months ago we had eight and unfortunately we lost, that, so now we're down to seven. We've had the two positions, we've had an engineering position open for almost a year now, had a very hard time filling that. We've had two or three candidates who've gotten very close to hiring and this hasn't worked out. Then the position that we had, then we unfortunately, a person moved on to a dream job of theirs, we're putting it up again soon as a project management, budget manager position to help us with our We do a lot of contracting, so it kind of helps us on the contracting side and our business side.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, and so hopefully you'll get to the steady state at some point.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Hopefully, we'll have, hopefully, not too long, those two positions filled, we'll be able pull team.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Good. Good. Because your work is really important. Thank you. Yes.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: So that's that's that's kind of the overall update.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: But you said you had a more detailed slide about Yep, water barrier I did. Okay.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yep, I'll move to that. Great. This is for table presentation only. Household was helpful because it was the slide we presented this last year. We want to go back and forth a little bit about time we didn't need to for this group, I'll skip over that one. This is a slide about the requested budget adjustment of $150,000 for the Waterbury Dam Tunnel And Tenstock project. The objective of the project to, at its root, was simply to inspect, evaluate and do testing and analysis of the condition of the tunnel which is a 14 foot wide, 11 foot tall, arch shaped concrete tunnel and then it feeds into three steel pan stocks which are 54 inches diameter down to 48 inches diameter. Basically conveys water from the reservoir through the dam to downstream to evaluate the condition of those pipes and tunnels. We had done a rudimentary assessment back in 2018. We had really not a lot of records before that so we felt it very important specifically with the upcoming spillway project that we're going to be doing with the Army Corps of Engineers. This will be fully the way that water passes through the dam for a two year time period so we want to make sure they're up to it. So the budget for this project was $1,800,000 which included engineering and contractors and we're requesting $150,000 amendment to that or adjustment to that to both level up back with the instrumentation project and to complete this project. Some of the cost overruns and challenges that we ran into, believe it not, the fall drought challenged this project and pushed the schedule into the winter to minimize impacts to recreation and environment. We had to schedule this project in October and November. That was the ideal time to be doing the project and as part of the project we had to actually raise the water level above normal levels about two and a half feet and spill water at our spillway so we can shut our tunnel off and be inside our tunnel and not put any water through it.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Oh, interesting.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: The drought made that with terrible timing because we couldn't get the reservoir to rise while every other reservoir in the state was slowly going down. Water was actually slowly going up but too slow to hit our time schedule so we ended up getting a late start. We decided to push ahead and go for it. Unfortunately, we had a very cold and snowy December. As part of cleaning the penstocks, water was used as a cleaning medium. That clean water turned into wastewater and was stored in these scrap tanks. You can see in the photographs which was really not ideal work to be doing in freezing December. We had costs associated with snow and ice removal, heating blankets, waterline, dealing with broken waterlines, frozen tanks, slowed production as a result. In fact, tanks which were supposed to be completed were removed after completion of cleaning which was done in late December are still on-site today because they're just basically frozen bricks and we're gonna have to wait till spring to remove them off-site.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Wow, so those are the white things

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: on The the white trailers are fracked tanks where cleaning water had to be decanted through those. The wastewater was taken to municipal wastewater treatment plants and the solids that were decanted out were taken to a landfill.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: If we wanted to go see that, can the public drive there now?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yes, yes. I mean it's winter conditions but yes.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah and it's a really interesting dam though to drive it to us.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yeah we can offer as well if we offer the house committee. If we do give tours to the facility if you're ever interested this time of year is not the best time because it's a little more difficult getting around but when the snow's gone, I'll be happy to give a tour of this facility and its whole.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: That's pretty fascinating piece of it. Yeah, It's

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: a sizable, additional reasons for cost overruns was additional inspection was required. We had some unexpected conditions that were discovered in the penstocks. This extended the duration of the project. Every day that we have to enter the penstocks over confined space entries that have a cost, a little extra cost associated with the worker safety parameters. In addition, we learned that the way the pipes were welded was not what was expected and we needed additional welding tests to really get a full sense of the condition of the penstocks, there's additional preparation and testing that needed to be done. The challenge here is that typically these are watered up, meaning they are pressurized penstocks, so we have finite time to get this data. We can't just do it next spring. Everything's dewatered, this is our time, so we sort of have to get it while we can. That's why we had to do this extra work and then also as part of this project, we have several gates and valves associated with the tunnel that have actuators which are basically just mechanical devices that operate the gates and those were in need of restoration and not been really heavily maintained since the original installation in 1985. They were removed and shipped away to be torn down and basically rebuilt and unfortunately both of them needed more work than what we were initially hoping. Unfortunately. So they're coming back, in an A1 condition but the cost was a bit higher than our initial quote.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So that's part of the hiring bids?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: That's part of it, yeah. That's the reason for extra dollars. Great. This next slide is designed to kind of show how our project maturation process is and how we're really striving to use as our work plan for these projects. As we start out with that portfolio risk assessment, which is what I was talking about, within 2024, we did a risk assessment of 18 high significant hazard dams that allowed us to quote unquote rack and stack them from highest risk to least risk amongst those 18 to for prioritization purposes for limited funds. The next step is to move to comprehensive assessment. Comprehensive assessment is a detailed engineering study that includes things like hydrology and hydraulic analysis of the dams, geotechnical and structural analysis of the dams, then development of alternatives analysis needed to address deficiencies or bring the dams up to standard and lower the risk cost estimates. It sets us on a path of what are the issues and what do we need to do to fix these things and what are the costs. From comprehensive assessment we select an alternative that makes the most sense based on a variety of parameters and we go to final design permitting. Have two point project in process at Noise Pond Dam and two that are very shortly gonna be in final design and then for final design we go to rehabilitation construction. And our goal is to have one or two projects, each one of these phases at any time at the moment since it's kind of a newer program in the way that we're doing it. We're kind of a little heavier in the comprehensive assessments than we are at the later stages and we're sort of just kind of sure we're gonna need additional financial support to be able to do more rehabilitation construction projects through the pipeline at the pace of one a year or so.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: How far ahead do you plan for financing?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: This is almost like a ten year plan because if you look at the rate of doing one dam per year, we have three of them in the design phase and six or seven in the comprehensive assessment stage. Once we have the comprehensive assessment we have a pretty decent sense for what the cost is going be and then we can sort of plan for final design and rehabilitation construction. That's sort of the pace of it.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, so there is a ten year plan maybe?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yeah, no, basically this is a ten year plan based on that. Capacity wise or reality wise, we can't really move through both structured projects, why, in one area, or maybe two maybe, but that would be about most. At that pace, that's a reasonable pace to kind of keep, I think, it moving. People have LS to move through the inventory in an appropriate pace and, yeah, but that's a level of funding that's probably realistic. Great.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Any questions? No, okay. Thank you. Keep going.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: This next slide discusses some of the challenges that we face in working through these projects and some of our plans for continuous improvement. Two of our large challenges that we do have is the time and resources that we spend in setting up all the multiple contracts that we have, moving through the RFP, the selection, the contract negotiations, execution step, as well as, working through legal issue contract, legal issues, which is pretty common on the engineering contracts as well as construction contracts. Working on dams is risky work by and large. One of the main tools that we're looking at and hopefully this RFP is gonna be out as soon as next week is engineering specific retainer contract. But rather than having to just RFP and do solicitations for each individual project, we're gonna get a retainer contract set up with pre qualified engineers that will allow us to much more quickly select engineers and move to engineering work. That's AOT does.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah, I'm surprised. Guess maybe you didn't, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yeah, it's gonna be in a four year contract so it'll probably be a of a challenge to get them set up initially but once we have them set up we'll be able to move much more quickly, it'll be a simple PO process and a simplified selection process. It should save a lot of time because all the back end contractual things that really do take a lot of time will be figured out just once.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And there's probably not a lot of contractors who do this.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: It is a limited number of engineers and contractors.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So you'll have multiple retainers?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: We'll have one retainer contract with multiple consultants

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: on it. Yeah, that's what

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: we have. We'll have we'll call.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So you

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: can choose who you want for a particular so there's still some element of Right. Competition.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yeah. It depends. You know, we have we have we have some flexibility to choose as well as to solicit several different ones if we feel several of them would be good choices to see who would be most advantageous by price or other benefits.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That's great. And so you are going to do that. You don't need anyone's okay or you've gotten the okays.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: We've gotten the okays and that's very soon moving to bidding and hopefully by springtime this will be a reality, and as we move to future projects, the amount of time that we spend on to a repetitive process will be brought down to a much lower amount of staff resources. Great. Other one we've already tried to mention is staffing. As we build our team to nine, that's really allowed us to look at things that we weren't able to look at before and to take on projects we weren't able to take on, so that's a huge advantage as well for us. That's sort of the conclusion of the update on overall capital spending type topics. This next slide moves into Waterbury Dam updates if that is something that you want to tackle and move on to.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Because there was something that went wrong or, my I mean, a while ago, like like, couple years ago. There was a complication with this ban.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Water breaks? Yeah. There's been several Okay.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. I think it would be helpful. I'm beyond. Yes.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Always interested. Good. Good. Yeah.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: So the the stretch is gonna go over some basic background on Waterbury Dam, talk about this building project that we're working on with the Corps of Engineers, going into little bit more detail actually into the tunnel and pent stock project that we're doing, going to a challenge that we had to overcome this fall with the dam, which I thought maybe that's what you were referring to, said there's a problem at the dam. There's been some challenges with this dam over time. It is the largest dam that we own, it's the third largest dam in the state.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Just kind

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: of go down through the slide here, the dam has a stranger of 109 square miles, it's located right over here in Waterbury. The northern end of the drainage basin is the peak of Mount Mansfield, to the West rebounded by the greens, to the East rebounded by the Worcester Range. It's a high hazard potential dam, meaning loss of life would result, failure would result in probable loss of life. The population at risk or number of people that are within that simulated imitation boundary should the dam fail is roughly 5,000 people. When you do a life loss calculation on that we come up with eight hundred and nine hundred people roughly so It's out there for Vermont standards. In terms of number of structures that could be inundated by a dam failure, looking at 1,400 and degree of damages, we're looking at that 300,000,000 to 800,000,000 range. It should be a catastrophe if we were lose this dam. The dam has three primary purposes. Number one is flood protection, that's what the original construction purpose was, and it's been calculated that the dam provides roughly 4,000,000 in flood damage prevented annually. Number two use is hydropower, supports a five megawatt power plant owned by Green Mountain Power, it's located at the base of the dam. Recreationally, this dam is very significant holdback, Waterbury Reservoir, which supports two state parks, Little River State Park and Waterbury Center State Park, as well as several boat ramps and accesses, and it's just a very popular recreational place. On the historic end, the dam were built, were put together following the nineteen twenty seven flood, which is the flood of record for this area. I think fifty something people were killed in the Windiskey Basin alone, maybe around eighty statewide. This dam and several others were cited and designed following that event. This and its two sister dams, Wrightsville and Eastbury were constructed and completed around 1958.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So when you said it's the third tallest Yes. Because I'm familiar with the dams, the Army Corps of Engineer dams on

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: the Mhmm.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: West River. Are those

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: The tallest one is Herriman Reservoir. Okay. Second one, I think, is one of those Army Corps dams. I'm spacing out which one is at the moment,

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: but

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: this is the third tallest. Okay. Moving on to the spillway project itself. This project focused on a project being done in collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers, with the original designer of the dam. It focuses mostly on the spillway system itself. In the early 2000s we started to have trouble with the spillway system. The radial arm floodgate, which are those, yellow shaded gates, started jamming issues, whether it get stuck in partially opened or partially closed positioning and couldn't be moved. This led to some maintenance being done and work being done to the gates and that followed with a structural analysis of the gates where it was found that they could only safely handle about 70% of their original design load, meaning that we have to operate these gates and have so for the last twenty or so years under a load restriction, meaning if we had a major flood, these gates would be able to hold back the full amount they were designed to, we'd actually open the gates and start to discharge water downstream earlier than this facility was designed to be discharging water downstream. The project components of work with the core is full replacement of gates one and two which are the two smaller ones that are shaded in yellow and restoration of the third gate, which is the large one, that one thirty five feet wide, that was added in the 1950s, so it has more modern steel and better reinforcing than the other two gates. The second portion is a downstream tow apron stabilization at the downstream end of the spillway, kind of where the blue shading is. There's actually quite a bit of rock erosion from discharges over past years of the bedrock. It's fairly poor quality bedrock at this site, so there's going to be some stabilization in that area. The green shaded area is the bridge that extends over the spillway and gives access for maintenance and for operating the gates. That bridge is in very poor condition. It's actually been stabilized in 2024. I believe we completed a stabilization project on that bridge and we're to be removing it in its entirety and replacing it with a vehicle with compliant bridge that can handle modern loads. It's very challenging to actually do work on our hoist systems because the bridge is a narrow pedestrian bridge The equipment inside the cabinet is very heavy and it's just very difficult to do maintenance on that so I'll eliminate that issue. Then lastly, repairs. All of the concrete unfortunately is part of the spillway has what's called alkali silica reaction. It's an issue where during original construction, when they put their concrete mix together, used an aggregate and a cement paste that caused a chemical reaction. It's something that modern construction they know about and they test for, essentially got eliminated from modern construction, but in the 1930s they were unaware of it or not aware of the level they needed to be. Unfortunately, all this concrete is impacted by that because it's caused premature deterioration and cracking, and so it's gonna be basically concrete resurfacing of almost the entirety of the spillway. So resurface. Mhmm. So schedule wise, the initial step was a risk assessment where we looked at the entire damn holistic manner to make sure that, the spillway was the spot we should run our money after and that's what the risk assessment confirmed. After that, we moved to the modification study where these different deficiencies and remedies were first determined and that is under final review. We started on design which has been going on since late last year until through 2028 and then construction is planned for 2028 to 2030 pending funding. This is, if you remember from last, this is a one year delay from what we initially had. We have of locked a year in the process and a lot of that has to do with some complexity of the project as well as some of the, I think frankly some of the staffing challenges we're having in the core given the unsettling at the federal level, their staff was reduced significantly smaller than what it was and so they're really taking this project down and keep it moving at a slow level.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Is that the local core?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: It's the New England District.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So just a little there's a little bit of sidebar, but the other dams, do they have the people that they have normally had?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: I I believe so.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: They were pretty tight. The the ones on the, West River, they they use the same crew for both dams.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: I I I I don't I'm entirely familiar with their staffing levels, but I speak I can speak to the design division within the Midland District. It's much smaller than it was when we started working with them a few years ago on this project. So that's something they've been working through.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And there were funding complications with this.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yep, there were, Emily's a slide on that, Emily will cover it in just a slide or two.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Do you have any questions, Emily?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: These next couple of slides are just to show progress that's been made on the project. The black contours on this plan are proposed conditions. One of the challenges of this project is just getting construction access. The spillway is located at the far eastern end of the dam away from the main road that gets up there. It comes to the western side. The access across the crest of the dam is very narrow. There's no easy way to access the actual dam, the spillway itself. During original construction, they actually built a road up from below and they did a bunch of things that can't really do anymore. So the current plan is to install this temporary, hopefully permanent road that goes from along the upstream slope of the dams, loops around to in front of the spillway, allows us to get cranes and equipment down there. It's estimated over 20,000 cubic yards, which is about 2,000 dump truck loads of material needs to come in to, build this road. But this is, you know, kind of the first hurdle is getting access. One of the first things that will be done in addition to this be drawing the reservoir down roughly 30 to 50 feet for an estimated two year period. This is a little unfortunate recreationally, but it's really necessary because we need to be able to provide commensurate flood protection that we have with a palpable spillway system as we would when the spillway system's torn apart and we're doing this project. And to do that we need to buy, store it by bringing the reservoir level down. In addition, we don't want to have the reservoir level anywhere near our gates because we're going to have the whole area torn apart. We don't want we're actually a very fragile state during construction so we wanna make sure we don't have water flowing through during that condition as well.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It's actually pretty impressive that a one hundred year dam doesn't need complete place.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yes and no. Mean, lot of other components of this dam are are pretty darn well well built sort of, but many of the components, especially the mechanical components, like these and things, do have a shelf life and, you know, fifty to a hundred years and we're sort of in that zone. It's it's sort of to be expected on this end.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So during that period, this will not provide flood protection then if the gates are out. The gates are out, but the reservoir will

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: be drawn down 30 to 50 feet. Rather than They have storage. Yeah, we'll have that storage. It should, the intent is to design that, I say 30 to 50 feet because that's gonna be designed based on the analysis that are getting done to basically provide commensurate flood protection to an optimal spillway. So functionally, people that live downstream should get the same performance as what they would be used to having during the work as when the project's complete.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: To connect back to the Pencil Penstock project, the importance of that piece of the infrastructure being in good shape is so that the water can pass under the dam and not have to approach the spillway construction.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: A year period, that'll be the sole way water's conveyed through the system. So that's why we wanted to evaluate it carefully on the Forest Firearms project. These just show some schematics of what the planned improvements are. The blue shading color is the planned improvements to the pier systems that support the bridge. It goes over the top of the spillway. You can see the bridge now is 14 feet wide for the most part and then 22 feet wide at the location of the lifting equipment. The bridge is being raised up to match the dam crest, which is a positive move and increases hydraulic capacity and obviously access, but you see that's a fair amount of construction. The image on the right here shows an example of how the toe protection is going to look like to hopefully arrest that rock erosion, protect the toe of the spillway. This next slide might be a little bit difficult to tell about The image on the left is the proposed design replacement of Gate 1 And 2. These were probably designed or fabricated in a shop in two pieces, delivered to the site, assembled into one piece and lifted into position. They operate on trunnion, which are basically big hinges. The gates rotate up and down the hinges. Those trunnions will be replaced. The concrete around that will be replaced and then the new gate will be hung on the trunnions, assembled and be made operable. That's what's happening for one and two. For gate three, that's the one that's purple and pink, that one had higher quality steel and better reinforcing. That gate is going be structurally reinforced. Notes there that we're going to add about 7,000 pounds steel to that gate to reinforce it and bring up the code.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So when excuse me. So when you're all done, you'll actually restore the dam to its original design capabilities? Exactly. Okay.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It'll last another hundred years, right?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: At least hopefully. Next major piece of work that's being taken on by the Corps and us is in the spring of the year, we'll be doing a design level self-service exploration program with the spillway. This includes drilling cores and forings into concrete bedrock and soil at the dam and also look at concrete bedrock interface. We've largely focused on areas of the spillway, particularly the piers, to understand how much concrete demolition needs to happen there to accommodate the wider bridge and the new trunnions for the pete replacements. Again, this is planned for the spring. It's always weather permitting with this work, because we're in the spillway, and spring dry. It doesn't spring on the drier side, we'll have no problems. If we have wet spring, it'll challenge the work. That's all we We've done this last summer. We should've done that and not tried to do the other project. We should've reversed them, but you get to a point on things that's just not possible anymore. It won't cross our mind, though. Let's take a step back and talk a little bit about that tunnel and pent stock project. Here's some kind of fun photos of the work. Again, the objective was to perform inspection, destructive and non destructive testing of the tunnel and pent stock materials. By and large, we've developed condition and remaining service life. The scope is listed here. It wasn't just cleaning and inspection. Was confined space entries associated with it which made us need to improve access into the penstocks. We had to install new manholes in order to remove the waste water out. Had to install drains. We had do some steel platform work to make it possible to even access and make it safe. We had to put a crane system just to move equipment around inside there because it's such a tight area. While we're still waiting the final report from the consultant and they're still kind of pulling together some of the results and working on that, I think kind of what we're thinking is the general consensus is the dams are in fair condition. They are certainly capable of safely handling the flow of current spillway projects. However, if we want to avoid probably somewhat costly replacement cost the not too distant future, we should probably be looking at a lining coating style project for at least the penstocks, something we'd finally start planning for once we're done with spillway project, that would be to much more thoroughly clean the interior and exterior of the penstocks down to bare metal and put on epoxy coating systems to prevent further deterioration before it's too bad. Then this last slide that I have is just to let you all know about a challenge we had this year. It was related back to the spillway project. During routine maintenance that we do every year, routine annual inspection, it was found in the Gate 3, which 35 foot gate, the brake system, that controls that gate was having trouble reliably stopping the gate safely. Led to a red tag issue where we had to place that gate out of service. We put it all the way down in the closed position. Alerted, we activated the damned emergency action plan on the non emergency advisory level so basically we contacted the downstream communities and said listen, have one of our three floodgates. While if absolutely necessary, not able to during a major flood, it could be, however, we have brake challenges with it, so replacing it out of service, just for informative purposes. We designed a new replacement, of course, with special order thing because of the age of all the equipment here. Installation was completed in 2026. While the overall project cost was not particularly high at $20,000 that includes design, equipment purchase, and logistics installation of getting it in place. Took a bit to get it going. Once it was in, it's tested and we're up to fully floggerable service there now. The EAP's been deactivated but it just serves as a good reminder that this equipment that we have on the way, a lot of it's 80 plus years old. It's near the end of service life. The reliability of it is not as high as would be preferable in all cases. If we were not looking at a $76,000,000 replacement project in a year, the next few years, we'd probably be looking at replacing a lot of this equipment sooner than later. We're sort of at that point and that need to be doing this stuff. I just had one more slide, I apologize. This last slide results of an analysis that one of my staff members was able to do. It's a great example, something that when we have extra staff, there's some things we can take on to great value for the program and the state, is that one of my staff members did analysis of all the maintenance and capital costs that have spent at Waterbury Dam from 1982 to 2025. That was basically the, we have actually had even older data, but that was really the most reliable timeframe that we had. We did subtract out major capital projects from this in assessment such as in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, did $26,000,000 to get control project with the Corps of Engineers and we didn't account for the spillway project with the Corps of Engineers we're working on. Now we're looking at more major maintenance and minor maintenance projects that we've done over the years and what we really need to be doing as we strive to meet not only modern dam safety rules, but basically the best stewards of this critical piece of construction that we can be. Hopefully leave the dam in a better state than we found when we took these jobs. Operation and maintenance costs from 1982 to 2025. All these costs were put in the current day dollars. We found that we spent since 1982 roughly an average of $200,000 a year on these projects at Waterbury Dam. They're low, we spent $0 in one year. At a high, we spent 1,600,000.0. And I think kind of our conclusions are that we need to play catch up really over the next say ten years, maybe a little bit longer, but we need to play catch up on a lot of maintenance work that needs to be done. And sort of an estimated annual need is roughly $500,000 to get to kind of where we need to go over the next ten years. That is annualized, in theory it'd be years, but that would be less than that. Years would be more because it kind depends on the actual project cost. We took the total cost and divided it by 10 to get that, but this is a very helpful assessment. We're extending this onto our other flood control dams and as well as all ANR dams, and think we all knew the concept that we sort of have a history of under maintaining this infrastructure unfortunately and so we're trying to get our arms wrapped around that and make improvements in time to catch up.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Good that's good for planning so the 500,000 a year obviously that's more than a 200,000 a year which was the what the average yeah So you'll put that in your budget and Yep. It'll be up and down probably.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yeah. There'll be additional dams too. This is just one of

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: You know, 100 dams agency homes. Obviously, it's the largest

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That's really important to know. Yeah.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: By far it's the largest dam, most complicated dam. Nothing's gonna be more than this, but there are many other ones. Yeah, this next slide is 10 points.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: Yeah, so we're going to talk through the funding portfolio for the work that's planned at Waterbury Dam for the spillway reconstruction project. So as Ben mentioned, we have the dam safety modification study that resulted in an updated cost estimate for this project, which through the additional planning work that had been done, they were able to drop the cost estimate down from 92,000,000 to 76,000,000. And part of that is, as I understand it, as they move forward in the process, there is the cost estimate becomes more accurate and they don't need to build in as much contingency. So that's good news that the the cost estimate is coming down. And as it moves through the design process, that cost estimate will likely be further refined. And in terms of the breakdown of cost share that has been secured for the work at Waterbury Dam over the year, initially when the feasibility study kicked off back in, I think, 2016, we were in a cost share agreement with Army Corps where they paid 65%. We paid 35%, and we were able to secure some funding through a special Champlain Basin program section of the Army Corps budget to support that feasibility study. And then from there, we moved on to the dam safety modification study that was a $50.50 cost share with nonfederal match and federal funds. And then the cost share agreement for the design construction phases, which we're just entering into now, was originally supposed to be $35.65. So the state paying 65% of the cost or sorry. 35. Mhmm. I'm I might have mixed that up. And so but fortunately, folks were leadership with the congressional delegation was able to enter into a much more advantageous cash share agreement with their army corps. When the dam was originally built back in the thirties, the state paid about 7.1% of the cost of the dam. And so we were able to reach an agreement to carry that cost share rate through for the design and construction. So thanks to our congressional delegation and especially Senator Sanders' office for helping us to get that cost share into place. And that was done through the Water Resource Development Act or Florida at the time. And so now at this point in the federal budget, we have authorization and appropriation. So for this project, currently there's $40,000,000 that has been appropriated to the Army Corps to support the design and construction with an authorization ceiling. That appropriation could go up to $60,000,000 We are working right now with our congressional delegation to increase the authorization ceiling for this project to $80,000,000 So hopefully that would give us high enough authorization to bring the project through to implementation based on the updated cost estimate of $76,000,000 And then following that, we'll need to work on filling in the appropriation for the funding. So getting that authorization cap lifted is the first step and then building in more appropriation for the project. So that's under negotiation now, and it's expected that the water resource development act will be passed later in the calendar year, which is pretty typical. So Ben mentioned that there has been a little bit of a delay in the design getting off the ground. So having the slight delay in the project timeline actually gives us more time to work with our congressional delegation to secure additional resources for this project, which is good news. As long as we can continue to hold the match dollars stable for this project. And maybe it would be a good time to move to the next slide. So, top table here shows the cost share estimates under the Dam Safety Modification Study. So, you can see with the 7% cost share, the split between what would be covered with the Army Corps dollars and the state share of that. Right now, because of that 60,000,000 authorization ceiling, the state would have to put a larger portion of the bill. But if that can be raised to $80,000,000, then the gap in funding could potentially be reduced. So right now we have $40,000,000 that's in the bank with Army Corps. The authorization ceiling of 60,000,000, working to lift that to 80,000,000, and then working to continue to secure the additional appropriation. And on the appropriation, there's a couple of different ways that that can be done. It could be from a direct appropriation from from Congress, or we can also work with the Army Corps to build that into their annual funding portfolio. So the court itself has funding that could be directed to this project. And so we're working closely with the congressional delegation to explore options for making the funding more whole for that. And so let's see. If we are able to increase the stealing to $80,000,000 and secure additional appropriation, we estimate that it would be an additional $1,000,000 in state match that would be needed to make the project whole. We already have $4,500,000 that was secured as part of the from the cash fund in 2024. And so it would be a $1,000,000 delta that we would work with the General Assembly to hopefully secure. If that ceiling cannot be raised to $80,000,000 then we're looking at a $13,000,000 delta that the state would need to work to fill. And then worst case scenario, if everything stays as it's as it's currently authorized and appropriated, the delta in completing the funding for the project would be $32,000,000 So it's good news that we are making progress working with the congressional delegation to obtain additional resources for this project. Status quo right now, there's 32,000,000 additional we would need to secure. If we can get that additional if we can get the project up to the additional $60,000,000 under the current cap, then it would be a $13,000,000 delta. And if we can raise the cap to 80,000,000 and backfill the appropriation, then it's a $1,000,000 gap in terms of raising state match for this project. As Ben noted earlier, if this dam were to fail, the the cost would be significantly greater than that. I think you had 300 to $400,000,000 ballpark for the cost of dam failure. So, this is certainly an important investment to make to prevent loss of life, harm to property, and additional costs. And we look forward to continuing to work with you all as well as our congressional delegation and the Army Corps to try to fill some of the funding gap here as best we can.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, if it's worst case, in what timeframe would you need the extra funding?

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: So if we are hoping that the project moves to construction in 2029, 2030.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Or as soon as late twenty twenty eight, you

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: know? Yeah. We hope that by next year when we are building our capital budget request, we'll have a better sense of the the outcomes of WARDA at the federal level and also a better sense of any updates to the cost estimate through the ongoing design work. So it'll be really important, most likely when we're building the FY twenty eight capital budget request for us to check-in on where things are at and see if there's an additional the magnitude of additional resources that will be needed for this project.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, that's helpful. Well, good luck. Any questions or comments you have?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: We have a couple of questions. What's the relationship between the cost of maintenance of the dam and the hydro facility? So you've got a user that benefits from the dam, and so what's their role in maintenance costs?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Green Mountain Power is the power producer, in fact, from an original project sighting, my understanding is that this piece of property prior to them being there was actually owned by Green Mountain Power. Green Mountain Power was looking at siting their own power dam at this site. Turned out their contribution to the project was they donated that land to the state, who in turn donated that land to the core to build a project at roughly that 7.1% that we're referencing today. As that being their project contribution, they essentially secured water rights for power production into perpetuity. They don't have I guess they negotiated a very favorable agreement back in the '30s, and somewhat dissolved from responsibility of financing dental repairs.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay, and my next question, when you draw the down, you're obviously gonna significantly reduce the head on that turbine. Correct. It's always going to reduce its power output. Very much. So is there any, do they have any recourse against state because now we aren't providing them with the I

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: think insurance says no, and they are project mean, despite that agreement I referenced earlier, they are good project partners, they're aware of this, they've seen us coming a long time. They work every project that we do. There's some collaborative effort that goes through it as we can both coexist in the same space and that works for positive rates. We're all

[Unidentified Committee Member]: of a sudden, we have to somehow subsidize loss of power generation.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: I think they have that. They're well aware of it and have that worked into their their planning budgets and are aware just like any project. And the the this spillway tunnel and pestock project's a great example. They've been offline for a little bit over two months because of that project. But, you know, we work we planned with them. They planned it. They're doing their own maintenance upgrades while we've been doing our projects.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: More pressure on the gates, which means we can raise the reservoir level slightly, which means we can increase the head on the turbine. Are they going to be able to actually generate more power, or is there something else in their design that would limit them from increasing their power output with the additional head?

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Yeah, that's a great question. Once the project, so the, there's two things going on. The state owns the dam, the state operates the flood control works at the dam. I thinking whether we could So sure, so you can see in this figure right here it's an upstream side photograph of the gates. You see elevation of five ninety two, that's the base of the gates. This is at reservoir level near normal which is five eighty nine and a half so the water level is two and a half feet below those normally and then the flood control band is from five ninety two to six seventeen and a half. GMP essentially owns from 589.5 down for power production and we own from that up to six seventeen and a half for flood protection. They're operating under a federal license to operate to make hydro power. These FERC water levels are what they are post projects. Post project this water level will remain the same so it won't be necessarily an increase in power production in that regard. There potentially may be a small increase in power production, I'm not really prepared or that familiar with what this exactly means, but when the project's complete, one of the things is that the winter drawdown will be going away, so I don't know that impacts them negatively, so they'll be able drawdown anymore, but they'll have a higher head, so I don't quite know, but that'll be one thing that will be changing for them. I'm curious. They're certainly well aware that there are some construction limiting the winter drawdown even with the new construction, so are things that still need to be Yeah. Hurdles that still need to be better understood. Yeah, that's a great question. Don't know the entire answer to this power, financial part.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Cool. Good questions. Anybody else? Questions or comments? I think this is a great presentation.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Thank you.

[Emily Bird (Water Investment Division Director, VT DEC)]: Thank you for having us in.

[Ben Green (Dam Safety Program Section Chief, VT DEC)]: Okay. Thank

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So anything else? Think so. We are