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City of Ann Arbor SSWWEP - Citizens Advisory Committee Coordination — City of Ann Arbor

SSWWE and FDD Survey Mitigation Timeline

Posted by Charlie Fleetham on 28 Mar, 2014
Category: No category

The SSWWE Project Team met last Friday after the CAC meeting.  We discussed the CAC's comments on the DOMP video, the hydraulic analysis, the forced ranking exercise (the values), and Greg Marker's report on the FDD Survey Mitigation efforts.  We concluded that we are now having two separate conversations: 1) what to do about future sanitary backup risks and 2) what to do about legacy FDD issues.  We believe that it is difficult for all of us to mix the two conversations in the CAC meetings. So, we drew up a new timeline for ending the SSWWE and FDD Survey Mitigation efforts (attached).  We reviewed the timeline with FDD-CAC yesterday and they endorsed it.  Please give us your comments.  Here are the salient points:

1.  In May, we will conduct a public meeting devoted to the FDD Survey Mitigation results (Greg Marker's work).  The FDD CAC has agreed to attend and of course, SSWWE CAC members will be invited, too.  We will also send post cards/emails to the survey respondents as we did for the Feb 6 public meetings.

2.   In June, we will have a joint SSWWE and FDD CAC meeting (a Super-CAC gathering!), to review feedback  from the May public meeting and to review recommendations resulting from the FDD investigations.

3.  After the June meeting, the FDD CAC will manage the issue mitigation process.  BTW - the FDD CAC welcomes SSWWE members to join their committee to help manage the mitigation process.

4.  As shown on the left side of the timeline,  the SSWWE CAC will now focus solely on sanitary backup risks - identifying them and discussing alternative solutions.  As shown, we are now projecting an August finish - about 30 days more than the original schedule.  (Note - we have not yet inserted a public meeting to review the SSWWE results - TBD.)

Thanks for all of your hard work on this project!

Charlie

Comments

Kathy Boris on 15 Apr, 2014:

Regarding #1.   The auditorium was not at all crowded for the Feb 6 public meeting.  Could the May public meeting be more broadly announced so that more people would attend and the general public would be aware of the meeting?

Regarding #3.   So the SSWWE will give away half of its work to the FDD CAC?   Am I understanding this correctly?  Is is proper that this idea comes from the Project Team rather than from the SSWWE CAC itself?   I know time is tight, but it seems like we should have heard something about this during the SSWWE CAC March meeting.

kb

Charlie Fleetham on 15 Apr, 2014:

Kathy -

Thanks for your post ... just want to let you know that we did email and/or send post cards to 800+ survey respondents, in addition to press coverage in the Observer and the Chronicle.  We were frankly expecting more people.  We intend to email/post card for the May meeting as well as announce it in the press.

As for the SSWWE CAC giving its half of its work to the FDD CAC, I think in my heart of hearts that the FDD CAC may think that we took work away from them!  In any case, The mission of the SSWWE CAC has always been an evaluation mission.  Fixing the FDD issues in the target areas arose from the survey and is being addressed by the OHM effort (Greg Marker).   It is proper for the project team to identify and address potential overlaps and conflicts in mission, and that is what appeared to be happening.  Ultimately, the FDD CAC has the mission for minding the FDDs that have been installed and may continue to be installed in the target areas.  At the last FDD CAC, the members welcomed participation and support from the SSWWE CAC and that is why we want to have a joint meeting to look at the Greg Marker assessment and provide input into recommendations that the FDD CAC may make about addressing current FDD issues.

This is my perception on the current situation. I invite Nick and Robert to comment if need be.

Nick Hutchinson on 16 Apr, 2014:

Kathy,

I think the SSWWE CAC needs to focus on looking forward rather than backward.  While it is critical to understand what happened in the past, and what may have happened that could or should be done better, the main goal of this project has always been to make recommendations for how to manage wet weather flow in the sanitary system in the future.

Kathy Boris on 17 Apr, 2014:

ok, thanks for providing some explanation on this change of mission