Chuck Freeman, Kennewick Irrigation District
Richland and Kennewick, as seen from Badger Mountain.
K
ennewick Irrigation District (KID) provides water to agricultural and residential customers across more than 20,000 acres in the Yakima River basin of Washington State. KID has 62 employees and serves 66,000 customers. In this interview, KID Manager Chuck Freeman tells Irrigation Leader how his district responded to the COVID‑19 pandemic and gives his advice about proactive decisionmaking. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and about KID.
Irrigation Leader: How has the COVID‑19 pandemic affected your operations?
44 | IRRIGATION LEADER | JUNE 2020 - COVID-19 SPECIAL ISSUE
IRRIGATIONLEADERMAGAZINE.COM
PHOTO COURTESY OF CORBIN HARDER.
Chuck Freeman: I’ve been the district manager of KID for 10½ years. We have a service area of 20,201 acres. We’re the last Bureau of Reclamation project in the Yakima River basin. Our district includes parts of the cities of Kennewick, Richland, and West Richland and parts of unincorporated Benton County. We have 11,000 agricultural acres; the rest is urban, surburban, and rural residential land. We have a little over 25,000 accounts and provide service to about 67,000 people. We have 62 permanent employees and up to 34 temporary employees in construction positions.
Chuck Freeman: We reacted pretty early—in fact, I thought at the time that I might have had people start working from home too early. On March 11, I started meeting with my department heads and my information technology (IT) guy to identify employees who could do their jobs from home. Twenty-one of us, myself included, have been working from home since mid‑March. Luckily, the district already had the necessary technology, so we had to buy very little. We paired people with laptops and created a virtual private network tunnel for each person so that they could get into our system in a secure manner. The folks who are still in the office are those whom we can’t set up at home, such as customer service. Five of those employees have to be in the office because they take in money, and there’s no way that we can have a person sitting at home processing payments. On March 11, we also closed the business to the public and restricted it to appointments only. The majority of our employees who work out in the field needed to keep working because we had to make sure the canals were safe and that we could deliver water. We created work silos—that is, teams of people who are isolated from one another. One of our crews was set up just to do work orders, for instance on systems coming back online after the winter. Another crew deals with another part of startup, namely managing the canals and the big mainline
