CITY MATTERS

and for me, the highlight was seeing the wildcat. For her, the highlight was the lemonade stand that had the bobo beds.

aircraft to Bartlesville. And at the time we had the hangars space and we were able to make that deal happen, and two years later we're into our second annual Back to Bartlesville Regional fly In. And it was really a concept that was started to bring back kind of the glory days of the National Biplane Association Biplane Expo and the Tulsa Regional fly In. But we had about eleven hundred people, I think a little over that out over the weekend of eight hundred and some Saturday and a

little over three hundred Sunday. And as you mentioned, it was very hot Saturday.

their heir that squadron. There's some eight sixes, but not WASP eight sixes, so they were selling rides. The airplane stayed busy all day Saturday and Sunday, which was remarkable. If you ever get a chance to fly at an open cockpit or a T six primary trainer, I highly recommend it. I got my first ride this year in a PT I believe it was thirteen or seventeen Steerman and in two S which is the Navy version of

the biplane. It was phenomenal, It really was. NOLLA is part of the Air Power History Tour, and as I've mentioned, they gave rides it carries the names. Kind of a

cool feature that the pilot showed us. They carry the names of some of the trainees from the nineteen forties in a wooden plaque in the luggage compartment, and some seventy plus years later, they were able to take some of the women that actually trained in the forties on a flight and let them fly the airplane again, some of them in their nineties.

And the Advans RV is kind of a kitplane. It's put you can put it together in your garage or your shop, and you have to have some skills, a lot of riveting and things like that, but it's an excellent flying machine. Has excellent flying qualities and at affordable prices. Many of those type of aircraft are used for aerobatic

shows and commonly perform all types of flying formations. I don't know if some of you might remember like one hundred airplane formation over Arrowhead Stadium to bring breast awareness breast cancer awareness that I think they shot pink smoke, but it was just and they were in the shape of an arrowhead, but it was pretty cool. I think they were part of that. But it's a pretty common aircraft for flying demonstrations. I want to thank all the

sponsors in the community, all the volunteers. Without their help and support, none of this would be possible at all. I'm very happy to have it, and we'll start planning for next year right away.

get inside of it, but we did. Yeah, we got close enough and got to see it, and like I said, it was kind of a sight to behold, and it was very cool to see it take off and you know, even watching them getting it fired up.

all over the world. She is going to be really neat and then a deeper dive into the definitions of some of the golden rules of the stage. And so if you're interested in live theater, if you love live theater, it'll be a really great program to come to. It is today, so if you can jump on in, it would be really fun to be at. And then October first, I mean, it's crazy to think we're all already talking about October, but all of my programs are looking at October.

October first is our in the Kitchen with Susan, which is our monthly cooking class with Susan. She's a local restaurant here, many years of cooking experience she loves to share, you know, how she made healthy cooking easy for her family and for other families. This is just an incredible program. If you haven't already caught this either, you know the best part is that this one is offered in person.

You can actually come to the library watch Susan do her thing live and then sample some of the delicious food that she makes. Or you can actually watch it on Facebook on our live stream and cook along with Susan in your own kitchen and we'll post what ingredients and things you need and you can just move right on along. And it's like our own Rachel Ray right here in Bartles Belts.

past come through. There's lots of candy, there's inflatables for the kids. We'll have some music going in the background, sometimes food trucks. I mean, it's just going to be a really really fun event, so please please come out and bring all your little goblins with you. We'd love to see all the trick or treaters and the library we'll offer some free books and all kinds of stuff

as giveaways, so that'll be really really fun. We're also looking at partnering with some of our local departments to do a Touch a Truck event at that day too, so if you have little ones that want to see inside a fire truck or a police car, an ambulance, and all of those kinds of things, will have there so that you can kind of take a look and see what it looks like inside those giant trucks. And then obviously the History Museum is doing some really cool

stuff in October as well. October seventh will be unveiling our new exhibit called social life and early traditions. It'll be focusing on the early life community of Bartlesville, so you definitely don't want to miss that, and in the vein of some of those early traditions.

fountain pins. So taking a back old school for our youth. And then and it's for all ages. Adults can come too if you want to try it out. It's actually really hard. I would love I was telling somebody at the museum the other day, I would love to have someone from that era like looking over my shoulder and laughing because I can't figure out how to use this pin without like dipping it twenty times to write one word, but it is really really fun to do, so that'll

be a really good one. And then October thirty first, it's you know, it's definitely spooky season. We're getting into October, so we had the spectacular with the library.

motive operations in a sense. But we want to talk a little bit about how we're doing on water supply, what we are doing for future water supply, and then talk about all the specifics that have on have been ongoing really since the early two thousands, that hopefully we'll start seeing some fruits of those labors here in the next couple of years. But as people may or may not recall, our water supply is four sources. So we have Hewlet Lake, which is our largest water source. We

also have water rights at Copan Lake. Hudson Lake is a city on lake just northwest of town. And then we have the Caney River, which is at Johnstone Park, and that is the original water supply for the city of Barsville, which was created back in the thirties. It is still in use today and still one of our primary points of water service for us. As many people have experienced, this last couple of years have been a

little bit tenuous as far as water supply. We did have the second worst recorded drought in history at Hewlet Lake and at Copan Lake, I believe that was the worst drought that that lake has experienced in its entire history, so fairly difficult time that we were able to come through and Luckily in Christmas or early this year, we finally received the rains that removed all the water restrictions and enabled us to use water on a more normal basis.

But prior to that drought, we were working on various options to secure additional water rights, and we continue that effort through to this day. So we want to just tell everybody what we're doing, where we're at, and hopefully where we will end up once this process is complete. So we did look at back late last year at all the water sources that are potentially available in the region. So that's going all the way down to Tulsa with Keystone Lake and Ulaga Lake, as well as over to

close to Ponca City with Caall Lake. We also looked at Skytook and Birch Lake, which are just south of us. There is an aquifer in central Osh County that's called the aid of a Musa Aquifer, as well as looking at possibly buying treated water from the Tulsa area, either

through Skytook, Collinsville or from the city of Tulsa. And so we looked at all the costs to secure those water rights, the cost to potentially get it to us, to facilitate a use, and really the top four options as far as the price goes were HeLa Lake, Copan Lake, the aid of EMUSA offer, and then call Late And so we've really been looking at those four options in much more detail to quantify exactly what that would cost, the time frame potentially to secure those water sources, and

then ultimately what that's going to produce as far as a payment that we would have to give to move forward with those options. So with both Hula and Copan Lake, those lakes are controlled and owned by the US Army Corps of Engineer, and so those lakes have a lot more conditions and requirements that we have to satisfy in

order to secure water from them. We were able to get a million gallons of water a day back in twenty twenty from Copan Lake after about twelve years worth of effort and assistance from our legislative delegation to get some language and a bill that made that option more affordable.

But the two options we're looking at Hula and as well at Copan Lake is to convert what they call flood control to water supply, so that in essence means that you would raise the elevation or the level of the lake so that those lakes would store more water. So with Heula Lake, that is going to be the most cost effective option for us to pursue of all the options that we've looked at, and we've been in discussions with the Core of Engineers to start a study

for them to look at what that would entail. They look at not only the impact to the structure of the dam itself, but also to potential risk and loss of benefit from a flood control perspective. So Hula Lake was originally built in the late fifties primarily as a flood control structure with a very limited amount of water supply that's available within that lake. So we have made those requests. We will meet likely with the Core here sometime in mid October to start getting into more of

the details of that study. That study will likely be a three year type of study that the CORE will perform. We will participate, probably in some form or fashion financially with them in that effort, and we will see how that progresses. But we do believe that that's a viable option. That was an option the CORE did identify in the early two thousands when we looked at that potential option

as well, so we believe that it's still viable. It's just going through the process to ultimately secure and to move forward with that option. So Copan Lake is really

the same type of process. They do have water rights available that are reserved currently by the Town of Copan, so we are working with them to get some legislation as in conjunction with the Town of Copan to release those water rights so that we can purchase those water rights and then move forward with the flood control reallocation as well. But with all these things, they'd literally take

an Act of Congress to move forward. So we've been very blessed to have a very engaged delegation of senators and representatives from the state of Oklahoma that have been working with us and on our behalf to put language together to move forward with that. So again that effort

will continue. These are projects that take years and years to do, and if they've have been years and years in the making, to move forward to get to that point, so we will continue to pursue that option as well to see if that can be supplemented as far as water rights and additional water stories that we might be able to capture at that Lake as well, so the aid of a mussa aquifer. So again, this is an aquifer in Central Osage County is considered or classified as

a major aquifer by the United States Geological Service. We have done some studies and we're able to find some previous studies that we're done on the amount of water that's available, how much can you pump out through a well,

and some of the different considerations for that. So while the aquifer is considered a major aquifer and there's over fourteen million gallons of water available within it, there is a very shallow aquifer and just not a lot of water that we can pump out at on a given well. So it has a fairly slow recharge rate, is how they classify that. So the water doesn't move through the soil very quickly, so if you pump out a lot

of water, it just doesn't replenish itself very fast. So to counteract that, you just simply can't pump out that much water. But what we have found through that water source is that if we had twenty five wells, we could get one point four million gawns of water a day. So from a usage standpoint, we average about five million

gallons of water a day. Our current water storage rights are just above twenty million gallns of water day currently and to get about ten million gallons of water day for future use, which should really get us for the next fifty to one hundred years from a water supply standpoint. So that option is out there, it's available, it's just not hope. It just wasn't as beneficial as far as the amount of water that we could get from that

source as we were hoping. But that's an option that the Water Resource Committee will certainly take into account as we look at all these in conjunction as well as what the cost impacts would be for the customers to pursue that. So the last one that we have looked at is Call Lake. So this is an extremely large lake. It's on the Arkansas River. It has a watershed or the area that drains to that lake starts all the

way at the Rocky Mountains. So it has a watershed area of about thirty seven thirty eight thousand square miles, So a huge, huge watershed, very large lake, and they do have an abundance of water that's available to secure for a water supply standpoint. So in earlier this year, we contracted with an engineering company called S two Engineering to take a look at what the cost would be in the pipeline pump station to get that water to us. That study will wrap up next week and then we'll

present the results to the Water Resources Committee. But that's going to be our most expensive option of the four that we are looking at, so it's likely going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue that. The good thing is that it will address our water needs for the next one hundred plus years, but we will have to pay or find a way to pay for that security if that's the option that is pursued

in the future. So in conjunction with that, we also are doing a little bit of an innovative product project at the wastewater plant, and that is what we are terming a water reuse type of scenarios. So this is where we take water that's treated at the plant and that we pump that water to the Caney River and that will allow us to capture that water again at the Caney River pump station at Johnstone Park, treat it for pottable applications, and then reuse that. So that's somewhat

of an innovative technology for the state of Oklahoma. It has been widely used on the coast, so both the East Coast and West Coast have done this type of application for quite a while, but it's new for us, and so we have been going through the process of generating data and doing different tests and scenarios to look at not only the viability of that source, the safety of it, looking at all the trace chemicals contaminas that can be found potentially in a waste water source, and

to see how we can treat that to ensure that that water is not only safe, but a viable option for us to move forward with a future. So that study was done earlier this year. We finished it back in June. We actually did a we termed a pilot study, so we actually simulated the process that we are looking to implement with the wastewater treatment plant expansion to demonstrate the results of that as well as to do all the testing and sampling to facilitate that you send to

generate the data that would be associated with it. So I brought for our Facebook Life audience. I've brought some demonstrations to show what good we've got. So here you go, Tom, here's your You got to be on point. Okay, let's go all right, make sure I get in the camera. So this is the water we drink right now from the Caney River. So the Candy River is our is

our primary water supply. So we use water from the Caney River twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and we supplement that with lake water in the summer during high use periods, but really every day we're using this water. And that's what it looks like in the river. So the next part, Tom, is you get to participate on which one is which which one is treated water. Let me get it, hopefully I can get it right

for the camera. Here we go, which one is treated by the river or which one is treated water that we drink, and which one is water that we send to the river from the wastewater treatment plant.

the simple adage is dilution is a solution. I don't know if that's a simple adage, but that's kind of an industry coin is that this water makes this water cleaner. It doesn't take a whole lot of technical background to understand that the.

city of Fort Worth, Texas is this already. So they've done this for a number of years that they have treated their wastewater and they reuse that wastewater for their drinking water. Drinking water source and the truth is is that we use all surface water. So we are drinking somebody else's wastewater and have been since Bortlesil has been a community and been providing water, and we will continue to do so as long as we are providing water

for the city of Bartlesville. Right now, Broken Arrow is drinking all of our wastewater and Lucky Lucky then so we're sending them a very good product. So we are. And so this is they call this de facto reuse. It's been around forever, it will be around forever. Just because water is not being made, we're having to reuse it from the various sources that we get or that

falls from the sky. And so that's what we are looking to do in conjunction with these four other options to secure our water apply for the next fifty two hundred years. So in conjunction with that, I always like to talk about what should we be putting in our wastewater, what should we be flushing? So, Lord, this is going to be for you. This is just an unannounced little test for you. So I'm gonna say, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you can we flesh it or not? Can we put it in the toilet or not one of

these types of things. So you and you and Tom can participate. This is a group participation. Okay, So what about a fleshable wipe? No such thing as a fleshable one such things. What if it says that on the container fleshable wipe, it's not sure, that's right. There's nothing fleshable about a nice because of that, that's right, that's right. So we call these disposable wipes. But they are not like toilet paper. They do not break down in water,

so they become basically a clog for your system. So people that are fortunate enough to flush them and they don't get stuck in their sewer service line. Eventually they do plug up the wastewater main. And about seventy five percent of the backups that we have to work and to unclog have disposable wipes within it. So if you have a disposal wipe, the proper place to put that is in the trash, never ever, ever in the toilet. Go all right, So what about bacon grease. I'm a

big bacon lover. I love bacon, So you get bacon grease. So pour down the drain when it's nice and liquidy. No, what about olive oil? What if you have olive oil? You know it didn't well.

the non biological stuff that's in the water. Unfortunately there's more than we'd like to have in there, but the rest of it is done by the bacteria and the enzymes that we produce. We just create an environment that these things work really really efficiently and do a fantastic job with it. So what about like paper towel? Oh, probably not probably not, probably not okay. So anyways, if you want to find out more of what you can flush or what you can flush, this is available on

the city's website. Please feel free to look at it. If you have any questions, always feel free to call your city management team which is nine one eight three three eight four two eight two, which they'll they'll redirect you to me. But we appreciate your help, and this is not only for your benefit but for everybody that served by the wastewater system.