Roosevelt Water Conservation District: Saving Money Through Public Outreach The Phoenix skyline.
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he Roosevelt Water Conservation District (RWCD) has been serving local farmers, urban irrigators, and other central Arizona water users for almost a century. Located on the eastern edge of the Phoenix metro area in Maricopa County, its 40,000-acre service area overlaps with the quickly growing cities of Mesa and Chandler and the town of Gilbert, meaning that it is acquiring many new customers that have limited experience with and knowledge of irrigation. To communicate with and educate its new customers, RWCD has hired several new staff, including Simon Wallace, its neighborhood liaison supervisor, and Allison Brague, its public and media relations coordinator. In this interview, Mr. Wallace and Ms. Brague join RWCD General Manager Shane M. Leonard to speak with Kris Polly, editor-in-chief of Irrigation Leader, about RWCD’s public outreach and how it has saved the district both time and money. Kris Polly: Please tell us about how public outreach has helped RWCD save money.
6 | IRRIGATION LEADER
PHOTO COURTESY OF ADOBE STOCK.
Shane M. Leonard: About 3 years ago, I realized that our front office and a good portion of my administrative staff were increasingly being called away from their normally assigned duties by customer complaints. In addition, we realized that although we had folks in the field who were knowledgeable about delivering water, including zanjeros, lead zanjeros, and schedulers, we didn’t have anyone specifically dedicated to addressing customer issues and complaints. That issue has become more critical as an overall measure of success as our district urbanizes. When it was a primarily agricultural entity, RWCD had 400–500 users who
typically knew what they were doing with their water and could solve most of their own problems. When we picked up 2,000 new customers in less than 7 years, we fell behind on customer service, and we have spent the next decade playing catch-up. Roughly 5 years ago, I sat down with my staff to review a year’s worth of field reports. At that time, we were generating about 2,000 field reports a year. Everything RWCD does from an operational standpoint—water deliveries, system maintenance, etc.—is catalogued through a field report. If everything goes the way it’s supposed to, the field report is catalogued and goes into a searchable database. If a field report occurs when something anomalous happens—a low head call, a no head call, or even a car in the canal—the field report is directed up the chain of command to the appropriate level for resolution. During this review, we ascribed a low, medium, or high level of importance to each field report and then assigned a time value to each outcome. We found that, particularly with medium- or high-importance field reports, as soon as the initial call came in, we were never going to get anywhere close to recapturing the stranded costs of resolving the issue over an appropriate timeline. After reviewing the results of the study and talking with my staff, customers, and RWCD’s board of directors, I decided to set the goals of reducing the number of medium- and high-level customer-related field reports by 50 percent over the subsequent 3 years and reducing the total amount of staff time spent resolving them by 35 percent. The members of my board were supportive of these goals, but as the businessmen and businesswomen
