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Joe Mouawad of the Eastern Municipal Water District: Planning for Future Development Through Septic-to-Sewer Conversions Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Joe Mouawad: I have approximately 30 years of experience in the water industry. I have an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Cal Poly Pomona and a master’s degree in engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. I’ve been with EMWD for the past 14 years. Initially, I served as the director of engineering, and over the years, I’ve had the privilege to take on additional responsibilities. Over the past 4 years, I have served as the assistant general manager. I oversee the district’s planning, engineering, and construction functions. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about EMWD as an agency. Joe Mouawad: We serve approximately 550 square miles of western Riverside County, an area with a population of over 825,000. We are distinctive in that we are both a retailer and a wholesaler providing water, wastewater, and recycled water services. We serve seven cities and large incorporated areas in Riverside County. We are the sixth-largest retail water agency in the state. Municipal Water Leader: What does planning look like for an agency like EMWD? Pipe being installed as part of the Quail Valley septic-to-sewer conversion.
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14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | February 2021
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF EMWD.
he Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) provides water, wastewater, and recycled water service to more than 825,000 people living and working within a 555‑square mile service area in western Riverside County, California. To ensure that it can provide these essential services far into the future despite the challenges of drought, population growth, and development, it carries out a variety of master planning and strategic planning activities. One significant area of wastewater planning relates to septic-to-sewer conversions, which must be accomplished with future decades of growth and development in mind so that the infrastructure that is planned and built is adequate to handle all the flows an area could potentially generate. In this interview, Joe Mouawad, the assistant general manager of EMWD, speaks with Municipal Water Leader about EMWD’s planning efforts, specifically those related to sewer conversions.
Joe Mouawad: Our planning efforts occur on multiple levels, including strategic planning, master planning, and facilities infrastructure planning. Strategic planning occurs with guidance from our board of directors, which assists us in developing our long-term vision and policies that help shape our objectives and priorities. Master planning is the process in which we evaluate the optimum approach to expand all our product lines to accommodate growth, including wastewater, recycled water, and potable water. In conjunction with master planning, we perform facilities infrastructure planning. We use the land-use plans that are adopted by the cities and the county to develop plans that serve as a road map for our facilities expansions all the way until buildout, which is currently anticipated to occur beyond 2065. Currently, we’re only about 38 percent built out. Based on those planning efforts, we develop and prioritize our capital improvement program and funding strategy on a yearly basis.
