Management of Water and Wastewater Utilities

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A couple of years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) noted the critical “importance of sustaining our Nation’s water and wastewater infrastructure. Effective utility management is key to achieving this goal. Effective management can help utilities enhance the stewardship of their infrastructure, improve performance in critical areas, and respond to other challenges.”

Put plainly, management of our water and wastewater system is not to be taken lightly.  A committee of industry leaders from seven organizations  (AMWA, APWA, AWWA, EPA, NACWA, NAWC,and WEF) found that water sector utilities across the country face common challenges, such as rising costs and workforce complexities, and that utilities need to focus attention on these areas to deliver quality products and services and sustain community support.

There are ten attributes provide a succinct indication of where effectively-managed utilities focus and what they strive to achieve.

The Attributes are:

1. Product Quality: Produces potable water, treated effluent, and process residuals in full compliance with regulatory and reliability requirements and consistent with customer, public health, and ecological needs.
2. Customer Satisfaction: Provides reliable, responsive, and affordable services in line with explicit, customer-accepted service levels. Receives timely customer feedback to maintain responsiveness to customer needs and emergencies.
3. Employee and Leadership Development: Recruits and retains a workforce that is competent, motivated, adaptive, and safe-working. Establishes a participatory, collaborative organization dedicated to continual learning and improvement. Ensures employee institutional knowledge is retained and improved upon over time. Provides a focus on and emphasizes opportunities for professional and leadership development and strives to create an integrated and well-coordinated senior leadership team.
4. Operational Optimization: Ensures ongoing, timely, cost-effective, reliable, and sustainable performance improvements in all facets of its operations. Minimizes resource use, loss, and impacts from day-to-day operations. Maintains awareness of information and operational technology developments to anticipate and support timely adoption of improvements.
5. Financial Viability: Understands the full life-cycle cost of the utility and establishes and maintains an effective balance between long-term debt, asset values, operations and maintenance expenditures, and operating revenues. Establishes predictable rates-consistent with community expectations and acceptability-adequate to recover costs, provide for reserves, maintain support from bond rating agencies, and plan and invest for future needs.
6. Infrastructure Stability: Understands the condition of and costs associated with critical infrastructure assets. Maintains and enhances the condition of all assets over the long-term at the lowest possible life-cycle cost and acceptable risk consistent with customer, community, and regulator-supported service levels, and consistent with anticipated growth and system reliability goals. Assures asset repair, rehabilitation, and replacement efforts are coordinated within the community to minimize disruptions and other negative consequences.
7. Operational Resiliency: Ensures utility leadership and staff work together to anticipate and avoid problems. Proactively identifies,  assesses, establishes tolerance levels for, and effectively manages a full range of business risks (including legal, regulatory, financial, environmental, safety, security, and natural disaster-related) in a proactive way consistent with industry trends and system reliability goals.
8. Community Sustainability: Is explicitly cognizant of and attentive to the impacts its decisions have on current and long-term future community and watershed health and welfare. Manages operations, infrastructure, and investments to protect, restore, and enhance the natural environment; efficiently use water and energy resources; promote economic vitality; and engender overall community improvement. Explicitly considers a variety of pollution prevention, watershed, and source water protection approaches as part of an overall strategy to maintain and enhance ecological and community sustainability.
9. Water Resource Adequacy: Ensures water availability consistent with current and future customer needs through long-term resource supply and demand analysis, conservation, and public education. Explicitly considers its role in water availability and manages operations to provide for long-term aquifer and surface water sustainability and replenishment.
10. Stakeholder Understanding and Support: Engenders understanding and support from oversight bodies, community and watershed interests, and regulatory bodies for service levels, rate structures, operating budgets, capital improvement programs, and risk management decisions. Actively involves stakeholders in the decisions that will affect them.

The Committee also explored the barriers that can inhibit improved utility management. These challenges and barriers provide insight into where a sector strategy should focus to be effective and how the Collaborating Organizations will want to structure their promotion of effective utility management to help utilities successfully make improvements. Within this context, the Committee identified the findings and recommendations for a future sector strategy. Read the full report here.

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